TEXTILE REINFORCEMENT CONCRETE

Reinforced concrete (RC) is the most successful building material of the past century and
most likely of the current century too. Combining steel bar reinforcement and concrete produces
an almost ideal composite material. RC is extremely powerful, durable, and cost-effective. It fits
nearly into every form, is extremely versatile and is therefore widely used as a construction
material in buildings and bridges. There is just one problem: to achieve these features, RC
structures need to have a minimum thickness in order to protect the metal reinforcement. A
minimum concrete cover of 2070 mm per layer is necessary to protect steel bar reinforcements
from corrosion during a building's lifetime.
Textile reinforcement structures produced from carbon fibres represent an excellent
alternative and complement existing reinforcement materials made from steel. Textile-reinforced
concrete (TRC) has the same advantages as traditional RC, but also offers some new
opportunities.

To produce textile reinforcements, continuous yarns or rovings are processed in a planar
structure by a textile technique to produce an optimal alignment and arrangement of fibres in
structural members (Figure 1). This in turn results in either a much higher load-bearing
performance than fibre-reinforced concrete (FRC) with equivalent fibre content, or in a reduced
amount of reinforcement fibres to reach an equal load capacity. TRC is the way to manufacture
thin concrete parts with an extremely high load capacity. Even now, it is a very promising
alternative for strengthening and repairing concrete structures, not least from a cost viewpoint.




TRCs are made from carbon fibre grid structures which are embedded in a fine-grained
concrete matrix & the result is a composite material with remarkable properties and advantages
in use:
No concrete cover is necessary to protect the reinforcement from corrosion since the
reinforcing materials used do not corrode under normal environmental conditions.
Considering that no concrete cover is needed, very thin strengthening layers can be
produced.
Carbon textile reinforcements have a much larger surface area than traditional steel-bar
reinforcements. Thus, very high bond forces can be introduced into the concrete.
TRCs produced from carbon possess distinctly higher strength than standard steel-bar
reinforcements. The current generation of textile reinforcements has reached strengths well
over 1,500 N/mm.
The use of additional TRC strengthening layers in RC structures has proved to have a
positive influence on subsequent concrete cracking. The number of cracks increases while
crack spacing decreases, and crack width is simultaneously reduced