Use of polypropylene ropes in concrete to minimize steel reinforcement

Abstract

Progress in construction and buildings industry depends on so many parameters especially materials used. Concrete materials are cheap but still need minimization in their costs. Steel is one of the materials used in concrete structural members to support the concrete as reinforcement. In this study a polypropylene rope (PP ropes) were used to support the task of steel reinforcement especially in tension zones and to decrease the total cost of the concrete section. To know how this matter achieved seven concrete beams were casted one of them was without polypropylene ropes as control beam where as others were reinforced only with polypropylene ropes. The dimensions of the concrete beams were (200cm ×30cm ×20cm). Whole concrete tests were done to find out the most effective properties of concrete like compression, rupture modulus and tensile strength. Seven beams were exposed to monotonic load to find out the load at failure and corresponding deflection at mid span. Results show that if four ropes were used in tension zone of the concrete section the strength increased by about 9%. This ratio seems to be low but the cheap cost of these ropes encourages designers to use more number of ropes in concrete section. This idea needs more future work.