Synthetic Fibre Reinforcement in Concrete Structures – Applications and Design (2023)

Macro synthetic fibre reinforcement has become widely used in concrete structures, such as tramlines, tunnels, industrial floors and precast elements. With using synthetic fibres as a reinforcement in concrete structures the casting time and the labour work will decrease, while the ductility will increase. In most cases the steel reinforcement can be omitted entirely from the structures using macro synthetic fibres, which can lead to more green structures. Nowadays, the environmental consciousness, minimizing the environmental footprint and the
CO2 emissions have taken a significant role in every part in the industries. Using synthetic fibre reinforcement in concrete structures, the CO2 emissions are much lower than with traditional steel reinforcement, because of their production, shipping and labour work have less environmental loads. The uniformly distributed fibres in concrete can also increase the residual flexural strength of the concrete independently from the locationwhich makes it possible to use fibres in cast in situ elements, like tramlines, shotcretes and industrial floors. Beside the cast in place solution the use of synthetic fibres in precast concrete elements started to spread, mainly because of the same benefits of shortening construction time. The typical use of precast FRC elements are tunnel segments, pre-cast wall and roof elements and also tramline elements. The calculation process of these structures always has
to comprise the static load, the dynamic load and if exist the effect of cyclic loading, i.e. fatigue. The precast elements also needed to be designed for temporary situations, such as demoulding, lifting, transporting and placing on site. These effects can be handled with advanced finite element analysis software, which is specialized for concrete and fibre reinforced concrete structures. In this paper the opportunities of using macro synthetic fibres and designing the fibre reinforced concrete structures will be presented with worldwide references.