Influence of adding short carbon fibers on the flexural behavior of textile-reinforced concrete one-way slab

The application of textile reinforcement to the tension zone of the reinforced concrete slabs as a means to enhance flexural capacity has been investigated by researchers in the past. However, the effectiveness of adding short carbon fibers as internal reinforcement in the textile-reinforced concrete one-way slab needs to be studied. The paper presents the experimental research conducted on four full-scale (1500×500×50) mm one-way slabs. An innovative Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) textile grid was used as internal reinforcement in combination with short carbon fibers. The first one consists of fine-grained concrete and short carbon fibers. Two textile-reinforced RC slabs have eight layers of fabric (textile-reinforced concrete (TRC) 8 L) with two percentages of short carbon fiber (0.264% and 0.528%), and one reference textile-reinforced concrete slab without short carbon fiber was fabricated to investigate the flexural behavior under a four-point loading system. The findings indicate that TRC + short carbon fiber showed significantly improved flexural capacity, load-deflection, and load-concrete strain behaviors compared with TRC. The new TRC+ 0.264% short carbon fibers (SCF) and TRC+ 0.528%SCF improved the load-bearing capacity by about 24.19% and 31.56%, respectively, as compared with TRC. Also, the intensity of the crack pattern was measured to compare the ductility of TRC+ short carbon fiber to that of traditional TRC.