Flexural behaviour of textile reinforced concrete composites: experimental and numerical evaluation

Textile reinforced concrete ( TRC) is an innovative high performance composite material which has revealed many promising attributes in various applications but test methods and reliable numerical models need to be established to reduce uncertainty and the need for extensive experimental studies. The aim of this paper was to evaluate the flexural behaviour of carbon textile reinforced TRC slabs both experimentally and numerically along with the characterization of the material and interaction level properties. The experimental results characterizing the bond behaviour were linked to the experimental behaviour of a rectangular TRC slab in bending through numerical analyses. A 2D macro-scale FE-model of the tested TRC slab was developed based on the related experimental input. Comparison of the numerical results to the experiments revealed that the flexural failure was governed by bond, and reasonable agreement was obtained in terms of crack development, deflections, maximum load, and failure mode. Accordingly, the experiments further indicated that the flexural behaviour of TRC slabs is greatly influenced by the bond quality.