An experimental and statistical investigation on the fresh and hardened properties of HFR-SCC: the effect of micro fibre type and fibre hybridization

Abstract

In this study, experimental and statistical analyses were conducted to reveal the effect of micro steel and/or polypropylene (PP) fibre with macro steel fibre as binary and ternary hybridization on the fresh, mechanical and flexural performance of hybrid fibre reinforced self-compacting concrete (HFR-SCC). For this purpose, some tests were conducted related to fresh and hardened properties. It was seen that PP had negative effect on the fresh properties of HFR-SCC mixtures compared to micro steel fibre. Moreover, multiple linear regression (MLR) was used to estimate the fresh and hardened properties of HFR-SCC as function of the percent of fibres by volume while ANOVA analysis determined the contributions of parameters. It was obtained from statistical analysis that there was a good correlation between experimental results and predicted values with approximately R-2=0.91 except for compressive strength. Finally, the use of PP with micro steel fibre as ternary hybridization increased the compressive, splitting, flexural tensile strengths, toughness and ductility of HFR-SCC with 1.1%, 13.2%, 18.8%, 14.9% and 26.3%, respectively, while the inclusion of PP into the mixture as binary hybridization had less positive effect on the hardened properties compared to binary steel fibre reinforced SCC with 0.25% micro steel fibre.