Investigating the Steel Fiber of Waste Tires to Enhance the Properties of Concrete Ground Slabs

This research aims to demonstrate the potential and viability of investing in smooth steel fibers extracted from waste tires for concrete works such as factory ground slabs and airstrip slabs, exposed to soil–structure interaction under live loads and the reciprocal alternation between tension and compression stresses. To show this viability, samples of fiber concrete and plain concrete were prepared and tested for compression, bending, and splitting loads. The main problem was the physical stability of samples and effective coherence between the concrete and the steel fibers during loading; thus, to analyze the laboratory results and assess the impact of fibers on mechanical properties of concrete under compression load, a method has been proposed to evaluate the effective ductility of fiber concrete and to calculate "the toughness and toughness index," taking into account the discontinuity and the physical destabilization of the sample state observed during the loading in the post-elastic stage. The analysis of the experimental results has shown satisfactory improvement in the behavior of concrete under compression and tension loads in the elastic domain, as well as a significant increase in its ductility and toughness in the plastic domain by two to four times compared to plain concrete. Likewise, this research shows that the inclusion of steel fiber enhances the mechanical properties of plain concrete by more than three times under splitting and flexure. This work resulted in its objectives where experimental tests proved the feasibility of investing in this raw material classified as a pollutant left freely in nature; on the other hand, the statistical analysis of the experimental results showed the best characteristics of fibers in terms of length, slenderness, and volume ratio to have a high range of fiber concrete for ground slab. Received: 19 December 2024 | Revised: 14 March 2025 | Accepted: 7 April 2025 Conflicts of Interest The author declares that he has no conflicts of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement Data are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Author Contribution Statement Afif Rahma: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, Project administration.