Enhancing the Structural Performance of Vegetal Concrete: An Experimental Study on the Tensile Behavior of Fabric Reinforced Cementitious Matrix Composite

Short Report

Abstract

In recent decades, vegetal concretes have attracted great interest from the civil engineering research community. Besides their low environmental footprint, these materials have interesting thermal, acoustic and hydric properties. However, their mechanical performance is low compared to the materials commonly used in construction (reinforced concrete, wood...), which limits the attractiveness of vegetal concretes in construction. It is aimed to overcome this weakness by proposing a strengthening solution using materials with good mechanical properties such as fiber reinforced cementitious materials. Therefore, at the first stage, this paper briefly summarizes what fabric reinforced cementitious matrix as a composite material for natural materials is, and how to behave under tensile forces investigated on a simple experimental study , in which alo covers the comparison theoretical models with the experimental results obtained from tensile testing.