Structural Behavior of Voided Fibrous Sustainable Ferrocement Slabs

The global trend at the present time focuses on reducing waste resulting from daily uses and those resulting from manufacturing processes and others, and one of the effective means of reducing waste is to reuse it in concrete in various forms such as powder, fibers, or aggregate. By reviewing previous studies, we cannot find a study on ferrocement voided slabs using plastic bottles. Therefore, this work discusses the fabrication of one‐way ferrocement voided slabs using steel meshes and plastic bottles. That is highly helpful in lowering the slab’s weight and reducing waste at the same time. Eight slabs have been tested considering four parameters: type of slab (solid, voided), effect of polypropylene fiber, method for generating voids (using plastic waste bottles, PVC pipe), and number of voided line (one layer, two layers). Besides properties of ferrocements including flowability, compressive and flexural strength has been tested. For all groups, the fibers increased load at first crack, while the presence of hollow did not affect the first crack loading. This because the first crack began for all slabs at the bottom in the tension zone, while the hollow is at the center of the slab where the stress approaches zero near and at the neutral axis. The voids affected the ultimate strength slightly by 2 MPa, but when adding fibers, this loss in strength was restored and the strength of the voided slab increased by 10.7%. But the rate of decrease in strength capacity is unsignificant compared to the benefits obtained from creating a gap, which contributes to reducing dead weight and also creating a sound and heat‐insulating surface. This is not the benefit of exploiting waste for this purpose, and all of this has economic and environmental benefits. There is a slight difference (decrease) between the strength capacity of voided slabs including bottles compared to that of PVC pipes about 5.8%. The reason behind this difference is that the tube is a single, integrated piece, while the bottles are in the form of intermittent voids but warped with a fine steel wire mesh in order to form a long, integrated, and continuous voided section. But the failure pattern of slabs containing bottles is more uniform.