LAYERED FINITE ELEMENT (FE) MODELLING OF CEMENT COMPOSITES COMBINING CONTINUOUS TEXTILES AND SYNTHETIC MICROFIBRES: A FLEXURAL ANALYSIS

This research presents a layered, semi-smeared modelling approach for the prediction of the flexural response of Textile Reinforced Cement (TRC) beams with combined continuous textiles (0.7v%) and short microfibres (1%). The constitutive behaviour of the composites was obtained from tensile experiments on TRC configurations and subsequently implemented in two different smearing approaches. The first approach concentrated the cross-sectional resistance in the load-bearing textile layers, whereas the second distributed the contribution of the short microfibres over the entire thickness. A satisfactory agreement was obtained between the experimental results and both numerical approaches, however, the distributed approach slightly underestimated the flexural response of the material.