Textile reinforced concrete members subjected to tension, bending, and in-plane loads: Experimental study and numerical analyses

Journal article, 2023

Textile reinforced concrete has raised increasing research interest during the last years, mainly due to its potential to be used for freeform shell structures involving complex load situations. Yet, most experimental work has focused on test setups with primarily uniaxial loading. In the current work, such setups are complemented with a novel test setup of deep beams, including in-plane bending and shear. Further, nonlinear finite element analyses were carried out, applying an earlier calibrated bond-slip relation and efficiency factors for strength and stiffness of the textile reinforcement. It was found that the structural behaviour in terms of the overall stiffness, ultimate load and deformation, number of cracks, and total (summed) crack width, could be described with reasonably good accuracy. The inclusion of a calibrated efficiency factor for the stiffness of the yarn was shown to be vital. Moreover, it was shown to be important to weaken and randomise the material properties of the concrete at the location of transverse yarns, to trigger localisation (cracking) in the numerical model.