Use of coconut fibre as an enhancement of concrete

This research describes experimental studies on the use of coconut fibre as enhancement of concrete. The addition of coconut-fibres significantly improved many of the engineering properties of the concrete, notably torsion, toughness and tensile strength. The ability to resist cracking and spalling were also enhanced. However, the addition of fibres adversely affected the compressive strength. When coconut fibre was added to plain concrete, the torsional strength increased (by up to about 25%) as well as the energy-absorbing capacity, but there is an optimum weight fraction (0.5% by weight of cement) beyond which the torsional strength started to decrease again. Similar results were also obtained for different fibre aspect ratios, where again results showed there was an optimum aspect ratio (125). An increase in fibre weight fraction provided a consistent increase in ductility up to the optimum content (0.5%) with corresponding fibre aspect ratio of 125. Overall the study has demonstrated that addition of coconut fibre to concrete leads to improvement of concrete the toughness torsion and the tensile stress, Further work is however ,required to assess the long term durability of concrete enhanced with coconut fibres.