Experimental and analytical study of the mechanical and flexural behavior of hybrid fiber concretes

The use of fibers in Reinforced Concrete (RC) structures may improve the properties of concrete; like reducing the shrinkage strain and increasing the tensile, flexural, and bond strength. This article presents an experimental and Finite Element (FE) analysis of hybrid fiber concretes. Three types of hybrid fibers were utilized, namely, hybrid steel-glass, steel-basalt, and glass-basalt fibers. For compressive and tensile strength tests, a total of fortyeight cubes and forty-eight cylinders were casted. The result obtained shows that fibers addition to concrete improves the compressive and tensile strengths. An increasing of the compressive strengths of 48% was recorded when compared with concrete without fibers. For flexural strength test, two RC beams were casted and tested up to failure under two-point loading. The beams have an identical size of 1500 x 150 x 200 mm. A nonlinear FE models were developed using ANSYS software to analyze the two hybrid RC beams. Nonlinear material properties, resulted from the experimental test, were defined in the FE models. The results obtained from FE and experimental analyses were compared and close correlations were found between them.