Stochastic approach for the material properties of reinforcing textiles for the design of concrete members

Textile-reinforced concrete has emerged in recent years as a new and valuable construction material. The design of textile-reinforced concrete requires knowledge on the mechanical properties of different textile types as well as their reinforcing behaviour under different loading conditions. Conventional load-bearing tests tend to be complex, time-consuming, costly and can even lack consistent specifications. To mitigate such drawbacks, a standardised tensile test for fibre strands was used to characterise the material properties needed for the design of a textile-reinforced concrete member. The standardised tensile test uses a fibre strand with 160 mm length, which is cut out of a textile grid. For the sake of this study, an epoxy resin-soaked AR-glass reinforcement was considered. The results show that the textile reinforcement has a linear-elastic behaviour, and the ultimate tensile strength can be statistically modelled by a Gumbel distribution. Furthermore, the results indicate that the modulus of elasticity is not influenced by the length or the number of fibre strands. Therefore, the mean value attained from the standardised test can be used for design purposes. These findings are essential to derive an appropriate partial safety factor for the calculation of the design values of the tensile strength and can be used to determine the failure probability of textile-reinforced concrete members.