Experimental investigation on the tensile strength degradation in curved reinforcement of textile reinforced concrete

Recently, textile reinforced concrete (TRC) has become a new approach for strengthening the existing reinforced concrete and masonry structures. When TRC wraps around the structural members, the direction of textile reinforcements changes according to the curvature radius of the structural corner. This paper presents an experimental investigation into the tensile strength degradation in curved glass and carbon reinforcement of TRC specimens. The results show that the ultimate tensile load decreases as the diameter of the semi-circle parts reduce. At the same diameter, the carbon TRC specimens have a higher tensile load-bearing capacity than glass textile-reinforced concrete. The failure modes of all the experiment cases are the fracture of the textile reinforcement in the middle of the semi-circle parts or at the transition region of the straight and curved region. The tensile strength degradation of both glass and carbon textile reinforcement has a linear relationship with the diameter of the semi-circle parts of the TRC specimens. The value only reaches up to 41% and 60% tensile strength of the individual filaments for glass and carbon fiber, respectively.