Experimental Research on the Durability of PVA Fibers Reinforced Concrete

In order to investigate the effects of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) fibers on the performance of concrete, such as strength, crack resistance, permeability and chloride penetration properties, experimental research were carried out in this paper. Three types of fiber reinforced concretes with 0, 0.5%, 1.0% volume fractions were designed with the same water to cement ratio of 0.43. Flat band method was used to evaluate the cracking resistance, while AutoCLAM and ASTM C1202 were adopted to measure the permeability of concrete. The experimental results showed that the workability and the compression strength decreased as PVA adding volume increasing. However, the tension and the bending strengths increased for PVA fiber concrete. The number of cracks induced by the shrinkage of concrete was reduced by adding more PVA fibers. The permeability and chloride penetration ascended as PVA volume increasing. However, all the parameters with regards to strength, crack resistance, permeability and chloride penetration for fiber reinforced concrete were more reasonable than those for the specimens without PVA fiber. In additional, a very good correlation between the permeability and the electric flux was found in this paper, that means both AutoCLAM and ASTM C1202 could be used for concrete penetration test.