Using woven recycled plastic fibers in reinforced concrete beams

The modern lifestyle, along with the advancement of new technologies has produced plastic waste and the recycling of these waste materials has become an important challenge for human societies. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is one of the most consuming waste materials. A solution to repel these materials is to use them in the civil engineering industry and buried them in concrete. PET layers and strips were used in reinforced concrete beams instead of steel reinforcements by some researchers. But, in this study, the longitudinal and transverse steel bars were replaced by woven recycled plastic fibers and tested experimentally. These woven PET bars are produced by the authors and used as a structural element. Six beams with different combinations of steel and woven PET bars are tested under two-point loading and the experimental and analytical results are presented. The results show that using these fibers concludes to increases the ductility of reinforced concrete beams. By replacing PET ropes instead of one, two and three tensile steel reinforcements, the ductility ratios of the beams are about 1.73, 1.76 and 4.12 times of the reference reinforced concrete beam. Moreover, some theoretical formulation is presented and compared with experimental data.

Automated summary

The modern lifestyle and advancement in technology have resulted in a significant amount of plastic waste, making recycling of these waste materials a crucial challenge for human societies. This study explores the use of woven recycled plastic fibers as a replacement for steel reinforcements in reinforced concrete beams. Experimental results demonstrate that this method increases the ductility of the concrete beams.