Flexural Strength of Modified Reactive Powder Concrete One Way Slabs

Abstract

Background: Over the last three decades, the interest in using advanced high-performance materials in the construction industry has been increasing worldwide. Recently, a very high strength cement-based composite with high ductility called Reactive Powder Concrete (RPC) has been developed. The RPC concept is based on the principle that a material with a minimum of defects such as micro-cracks and voids will be able to achieve greater load-carrying capacity and durability. Methods: In the present paper, an experimental program of sixteen reinforced concrete one-way slabs was conducted to investigate their behavior under flexural loading. Four of these slabs were with Normal Concrete (NC) and the others of Modified Reactive Powder Concrete (MRPC). All slabs were identical in the dimension of its length and width (1000×500) mm, respectively, and its thickness was varied as one of the variables used in the present work. Other parameters for a one-way slab are concrete type, steel fibers content and flexural steel reinforcement ratio (0.33 and 0.66)%. Results: The results showed that the MRPC slabs with steel fibers failed in a ductile manner and had ultimate load capacity more than that of non-fibrous MRPC with an improvement percentage that reaches up to (66) %. This percentage became (212) % in comparison with normal concrete slabs. Conclusions: Moreover, the results showed that slabs, for both concrete types, reinforced with lower steel ratio failed by tension mode, otherwise, the slabs of higher reinforcement steel ratio failed by combined tension-shear mode. However, an improvement was observed in the ultimate load capacity up to (53 and 98) % when the ratio of steel reinforcement and slab thickness increased, respectively.

Structural Behavior of Reinforced Reactive Powder Concrete One-Way Slab

“…The saving of concrete in bubble slabs was 18% compared to the solid slab, and the bubble slabs achieve the requirements of sustainability [22]. Abtan and Hassan (2019) studied the flexural strength of modified reinforced reactive powder concrete (MRPC) one-way slabs, the result showed that: An improvement in the ultimate load was achieved for modified reactive powder concrete slabs when increasing the thickness of the slab, adding the steel fibers with a proportion of (0.4%, 0.8%) to the concrete mixture of the MRPC slabs enhanced the ultimate load capacity, increased the ductility of MRPC slabs, improved their stiffness, reduced the rate of propagation of cracks, and reduces the width of cracks [23]. From the previous studies which dealt with the field of the structural behavior of reactive powder reinforced concrete one-way slab, it can be noted that most of these studies focused on investigating the effect of opening in RPC one-way slabs, sustainable flooring elements of RPC bubbled slabs, modified reactive powder concrete one-way slabs, and some other parameters, but did not focus on the behavior of RPC one-way solid slabs, which is one of the fields that require study because, until this time, no research has dealt with this field and there is a lack of information about the analysis and design of RPC one-way solid slabs.…”