Building lightweight structures with CFRP-reinforced UHPC: research approach, construction materials, and conceptual design of three building components

Abstract

The building industry, and especially the concrete industry, consumes a considerable proportion of the natural resources extracted from the lithosphere and is responsible for a large part of the solid waste generated worldwide. Unfortunately, this fact has not yet generated a movement to counter the trend; rather, a huge increase in the use of concrete in new structures can be observed. It is imperative to counteract this development by optimally exploiting the material properties of concrete in order to improve its efficiency. One strategy being pursued at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna and TU Wien is to reduce the amount of concrete and reinforcement in structures by using high-performance materials such as carbon-fibre-reinforced polymers (CFRP) in ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) members. This permits a crucial reduction in the self-weight and allows for the design of very lightweight precast concrete elements. The authors' goal is to use CFRP rods as bending reinforcement and a combination of flat and preformed CFRP textiles as shear and structural reinforcement. In the first part of this paper, the research approach is introduced and a comprehensive overview of the state of the art of UHPC and CFRP reinforcement is given. The second part contains a description of the conceptual design of some structural members (one floor element and two T-beams), starting with the development of a suitable UHPC mixture. Furthermore, preliminary uniaxial tensile tests of textile reinforced UHPC strips are described and evaluated. In the final part of this paper, the authors present parameter studies for different reinforcement types, values, additional prestressing of the rod reinforcement and the first prototypes. They are used to give an estimation of the feasibility, the load-bearing and deflection behaviour of the proposed building components.