INVESTIGATIONS ON FERROCEMENT FLOORING UNITS

Abstract

Ferrocement has been recognized to be a well suited material for housing, marine, agricultural and many other purposes in developing countries these days. The basic idea behind this material is the fact that concrete can withstand large strains in the neighbourhood of the reinforcement and that the magnitude of the strains depends on the distri-bution and subdivision of the reinforcement throughout the mass of the concrete. Recently, ferrocement has received a lot of attention as a building construction material in many countries especially for roofing and flooring in housing construction due to its lighter weight, ease of construction, economy of materials and architectural flexibility. In this disserta-tion, an attempt has been made to see the suitability of cored ferrocement slabs as flooring/roofing units. Provision of cores in ferrocement slabs further reduces the weight and they inturn.leads to lighter and economical supporting system and foundations. The behaviour • of cored strips is studied in the experiment with the variation in the shape of cores, number of cores, the amount of steel mesh provided and whether or not peripherial reinforcement provided around the cores and their effect on their first crack load and deflections. A theoretical procedure was proposed for the analysis of these units and then experimental investigations were carried out to check their validity. From the comparison of experimental and theoretical results, it was seen that the first crack load and deflection fall within an accuracy of 85-95X by using the proposed method of analysis. It was also found that the ferrocement slabs with circular cores can be used as flooring/roofing units and they satisfy both serviceability requirements of deflection and crack width according to 1S:456-1978.