Experimental Study on Strength Properties of Steel Fibre Reinforced Concrete

The Infrastructure needs of our country is increasing day by day and concrete is a main constituent of construction material in a significant portion of this infrastructural system. It is necessary to enhance its characteristics by means of strength and durability. It is also responsible to compensate concrete in the form of using waste material and saves in cost by the use of admixtures such as fly ash, silica fume etc, as a partial replacement of cement. One of the many ways this could be achieved by developing new concrete composites with the fibres which are locally available that makes even non engineered construction can work well under severe loads like earthquake or sudden vibrations and natural disasters or attacks. Use of fibre to concrete has long been experienced since 1990. In the early 1900’s asbestos fibre were used in concrete and in 1950’s concept of composite materials came into being & fibre reinforced concrete was one of the focus of interest. To bring into focus the use of steel fibre in concrete an experimental programme was planned to study the material characteristics. In this paper M 35 grade of concrete mix design is carried out using fly ash. This present paper deals with the experimental study of steel fibre reinforced concrete. Steel fibre is added in 0.5, 1%, 1.5% dosages and followed by increments of flyash 10%, 20%. M 35 (1:1.44:2.69) grade of concrete is designed with water-cement ratio of 0.45. Physical properties of cement, fine aggregate, coarse aggregate, steel fibre is carried out. This study reports the feasibility of use of steel fibres and their effect due to variation in fibre content on structural properties such as cube compressive strength, split tensile strength. The workability tests on fresh concrete and strength tests on hardened concrete are also carried out. Compressive strength v/s mix designation, split tensile strength v/s mix designation are plotted graphically. The optimum dosage and mix designation for higher strength is found.