Natalie Williams Portal

Sustainable Potential of Textile-Reinforced Concrete

The building construction industry is in need of sustainable materials and solutions. A novel building material, such as textile-reinforced concrete (TRC), could be used to meet this demand. TRC is a combination of fine-grained concrete and multi-axial textile fabrics, which has been fundamentally researched over the past decade. TRC-based research has explored various facets of this composite material, such as its structural functionality, production, applicability and design. One key aspect that is still missing, however, is a comprehensive review of the sustainable potential of this material in terms of its input-output and durability which suitably answers to requirement no.7 of EU’s Construction Products Regulation. This article provides qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the sustainable potential and prospective development of TRC particularly reinforced by alkali-resistant (AR) glass, carbon or basalt fibers. Based on the outcome of this evaluation, carbon textile fibers were observed to hold the optimal potential mechanical behavior; additionally, it was revealed through the conducted Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), that basalt had the least cumulative energy demand while carbon had the least environmental impact.

Numerical modelling of UHPC and TRC sandwich elements for building envelopes

In this paper a modelling approach is presented to reproduce the mechanical behaviour of sandwich panels via finite element analysis. Two types of panels were investigated in this scope of work. The first sandwich element was a textile reinforced concrete (TRC) panel with cellular lightweight concrete insulation and the second configuration was an ultra-high performances concrete (UHPC) panel with aerated autoclaved concrete insulation. The goal was to obtain a reliable numerical strategy that represents a reasonable compromise in terms of sufficient accuracy of the element characteristics and the computational costs. The results show the possibility of describing the composite action in a full sandwich panel. The achieved modelling approach will later be used for the optimization of TRC and UHPC panels in terms of minimizing the thickness, identifying the number and location of connectors, as well as evaluating varying anchorage systems.

Structural performance of GFRP connectors in composite sandwich facade elements

To take structural aspects into consideration in the SESBE research project, focusing on the development of “smart” facade elements a systematic testing and modelling program has been developed for the verification of the structural performance of the facade sandwich elements. The present paper mainly focuses on the verification of the mechanical performance of the glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) connectors of the novel type of facade element composed of reactive powder concrete (RPC) panels with foam concrete insulation between them. Because of the reduced thickness of the large facade elements, the performance of the connectors is critical for the entire structural concept. The first series of the testing programme concerning connector performance are presented here. The results suggest that sufficient strength and ductility of the connectors can be ensured using GFRP in the proposed thin light-weight facade elements.