An experimental study on the workability of carbon fiber reinforced self-compacting concrete

This study aimed to experimentally investigate the effect of carbon fiber volume fraction and silica fume on the fresh properties of self-compacting concrete. For this, two different self-compacting concrete series were manufactured in this study. First self-compacting concrete series was produced without silica fume while the second series was manufactured with 10% silica fume by weight of total binder content. In both self-compacting concrete series, the total binder content and water-to-binder ratio was kept constant as 530 kg/m3 and 0.37, respectively. Besides, Portland cement was substituted with fly ash at the level of 30% by weight. Moreover, to explore the effect of carbon fiber content, four carbon fiber volume fractions of 0%, 0.5%, 1.0%, and 1.5% were considered in this study. In total, eight carbon fiber reinforced self-compacting concrete mixtures were designed. The fresh properties of self-compacting concrete mixtures were evaluated in terms of slump flow diameter, T50 slump flow time, V-funnel time, and L-box height ratio. In addition to these test, the rheological properties of the carbon fiber reinforced self-compacting concretes were experimentally investigated. The results indicated that the workability properties of self-compacting concretes significantly affected by the carbon fiber addition. It was also observed that the use of carbon fiber increased the superplasticizer demand. Keywords: Carbon fiber; Experimental study; Self-compacting concrete; Silica fume; Workability properties.