Experimental study on durability properties of engineered cementitious composites

Abstract

Concrete is one of the most important materials, used in the construction industry for many decades. In order to enhance various properties such as, ease of workability, high compression strength, high performance, self-healing and to increase the tensile strength of concrete, many research works are being carried out throughout the world. As we know that concrete is strong in resisting compression load and weak in resisting the tensile load. Numerous research works were carried out and Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC), a concrete with high tensile strength was developed. ECC is a class of ultra-ductile and short discrete fibre reinforced composites, developed for challenging applications. ECC belongs to the family of high performance fibre reinforced cementitious composites. High ductility, high strain hardenings through multiple cracking and tight crack width are some of the unique properties of ECC. This makes ECC superior to normal concrete which has inherent weaknesses due to its brittleness nature in both tension and shear. The addition of fibres in ECC, may result in higher toughness index and damage tolerance than the ordinary concrete. This clearly explains the higher mechanical properties and better structural performance of ECC. From the review of available literature, it is observed that more research is needed to improve the durability of ECC. Hence, this study has been carried out to develop a new class of ECC with high resistance to cracks and find out the optimum amount of fibre and silica fume content that are to be added in to mix. newline