BEHAVIOUR OF TWO-WAY COMPOSITE FERROCEMENT-BRICK REINFORCED SLABS

Abstract

Reinforced Cement Concrete, the most popular construction material in building industry now-a-days, requireE. large quantity of cement, mechanical machines for mixing, compaction etc., high degree of supervision and thus is not cconomically viable especially in rural areas and in small scale construction. Due to the shortage of above mentioned materials and of highly skilled labour, various forms of composite construction are being adopted. Reinforced brick masonry is one such example in which compression and tension are taken by masonry and reinforcing steel respectively. How ever, this type of construction is relatively brittle in nature and suffers extensively from corrosion damage due to higher absorptivity of bricks. Another improved version is Ferrocement-brick masonry construction in which the brick masonry is reinforced with a. wire mesh at the tenF.ion face. Then the properties of ferrocement viz. water proofing quality, additional strength and ductility, check on crack widths etc. are effectively utilised modifying the brick masonry properties. This system can be use to strengthen and rehabilitate the existing distressed structures. This thesis investigates the behaviour of two-way ferrocement-brick masonry composite slabs of size lmxlmxO.14m iv with zero, one and two layers of mesh. The main objectives of the thesis are i) To study the effect of number of mesh layer on cracking load, ultimate load, deflection and cracks and ii) To study the increase in ductility with inclusion of mesh layers at tension face iii) To develop a suitable rational basis for the design of two-way composite ferrocement-reinforced brick flexural elements. It was found that the first crack load and the ultimate collapse load increases with the number of :mesh layers. Crack width is reduced and number of cracks are increased as the number of mesh layers increases. The ductility defined as, the ratio of ultimate deflections to the deflections at safe service load, increases with an increase in number of mesh layers.