Ductility and flexure of lightweight expanded clay basalt fiber reinforced concrete slab

Relevance. The load on a reinforced concrete slab with high strength lightweight aggregate concrete leads to increased brittleness and contributes to large deflection or flexure of slabs. The addition of fibers to the concrete mix can improve its mechanical properties including flexure, deformation, toughness, ductility, and cracks. The aims of this work are to investigate the flexure and ductility of lightweight expanded clay concrete slabs reinforced with basalt fiber polymers, and to check the effects of basalt fiber mesh on the ductility and flexure. Methods. The ductility and flexural/deflection tests were done on nine engineered cementitious composite (expanded clay concrete) slabs with dimensions length 1500 mm, width 500 mm, thickness 65 mm. These nine slabs are divided in three reinforcement methods types: three lightweight expanded clay concrete slab reinforced with basalt rebars ∅10 mm (first slab type); three lightweight expanded clay concrete slab reinforced with basalt rebars ∅10 mm plus dispersed chopped basalt fiber plus basalt fiber polymer (mesh) of cells 25×25 mm (second slab type); three lightweight expanded clay concrete slab reinforced with basalt rebars ∅10 mm plus dispersed basalt fiber of length 20 mm, diameter 15 µm (third slab type). The results obtained showed physical deflection of the three types of slab with cracks. The maximum flexural load for first slab type is 16.2 KN with 8,075 mm deflection, second slab type is 24.7 KN with 17,26 mm deflection and third slab type 3 is 32 KN with 15,29 mm deflection. The ductility of the concrete slab improved with the addition of dispersed chopped basalt fiber and basalt mesh.