Investigation of flexural behavior of steel fiber reinforced concrete and steel fiber orientation control during construction

Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world, and its consumption has been increasing. The main benefits of concrete include its durability, availability of the components, and great strength in compression. Despite all these advantages, however, concrete is a brittle material with a relatively low tensile strength and deformation capacity. It is, therefore, vulnerable to cracking under tension, which can lead to sudden catastrophic failures of concrete structures. In order to control and reduce cracking, reinforcement of concrete is necessary. The most commonly used reinforcement technique in structural application is the use of deformed steel bars. However, despite its popularity, steel bar reinforcement has a number of disadvantages. Thus, alternative methods of reinforcement have been developed, one of which is steel fiber reinforcement. The addition of steel fibers in concrete matrix is proven to help control cracking and significantly improve ductility of the material. This research presents an investigation of steel fiber reinforced concrete’s (SFRC) flexural behavior before and after cracking in tension occurs. Various aspects of the effectiveness of this type of reinforcement are discussed, including the fibers orientation within the composite material mix, its ability to bond with concrete, and its distribution. The FEM-based analytical model for SFRC flexural behavior prediction is proposed, which showed reasonable agreement with the test data