Experimental Investigating on Strength Properties of No-fines Concrete with Cloth Jacketing

The lightweight structures are being common now a day. No-fine concrete being the lightweight concrete with pervious characteristics and low heat conductivity are in extensive use, but possess a drawback of being low in strength. Steel jacketing is a common practice for conventional concrete to increase its strength however there is lack of bondage of steel with no-fine concrete and it is prone to corrosion. To encounter this problem, the cloth jacketing with locally available used cloth fabrics is opted to increase the strength of no-fine concrete. Cloth fabrics were collected from used cloth market, university hostels and dismantled fabric that, would either be dumped into the landfills or burned away. After the analysis of fabrics, the cloth strips of (500 × 50) mm were prepared from eight available cloth fabrics (such as Atal, Chiffon, Khaddar, Lawn, Silk, Tissue, Shabnamzra and Jeans) for the tensile testing, mass per unit area, yarn count and microscopic analysis of each cloth were conducted. From the tests, it has been concluded that Jeans has shown more tensile strength 19.81 MPa, thus we have used as the jacketing material over no-fine concrete. 19 mm to 10 mm aggregate were opted and 1:6 cement to aggregate ratio was taken for experiment. By performing compression and splitting tensile strength tests on textile reinforced no-fine concrete results give the increased strength of no-fine concrete up to 17.18% and 27.7% for one layer, 20.53% and 31.5% for two layers and 23.88% and 38.0% for three layers of cloth jacketing, respectively. The use of cloth strips as reinforcements also increases the flexural strength of no-fine concrete up to 22.2%. Although there is limitation for the use of jacketing regarding type and timeline of structure, it enhances the strength of no-fine concrete giving innovative approach to construction industry and reasonable use and consumption of waste material.