Confinement effect of glass fabrics bonded with cementitious and organic binders

Wrapping with advanced composite materials improve the behaviour of concrete structural elements in terms of increase in strength, ultimate strain and corresponding stress of confined concrete. This paper deals with the performance of concrete specimens confined with fabric reinforcement in cementitious binder (FABcrete) and in organic binder consisting of resins (FABpoly). Experiments have been conducted on plain and confined concrete cylindrical specimens under compression. It has been observed from the experimental studies that the specimen confined with FABcrete enhances the load carrying capacity and ductility similar to that of FABpoly confined specimen. Further, the failure of FABcrete specimen is observed to be vertical split, which is similar to that of plain concrete specimen. In the case of FABpoly specimen, failure has been initiated in the mesh region of fabric and ultimate failure is by spalling of concrete in the same region. Also, the failure of FABcrete specimen has been less abrupt and controlled as compared to the failure behaviour of FABpoly specimen. In comparison with FABpoly, FABcrete approximately has the same effectiveness in increasing strength and a slightly inferior ultimate strain. It can be concluded that FABcrete can also be used as a confining system for retrofitting applications.