الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Concrete walls are one of the most important elements of concrete structures. Concrete walls are used in resisting both vertical and horizontal loads. Despite the importance of concrete walls, they are considered as costly concrete elements in terms of their own reinforcing components (whether longitudinal or transverse steel bars). Concrete walls also have heavy own weight which affect the total weight of the structures. Producing lightweight concrete walls using ferrocement technology and using durable and enhanced materials could enhance the mechanical behavior of concrete walls and provide new solutions for different construction purposes. This work aims to study the structural behavior of ferrocement lightweight walls in terms of ultimate failure loads, first crack loads, energy absorptions, ductility ratios, serviceability loads and cracking behavior with using different steel meshes experimentally and theoretically. The work was established in two stages: • The experimental first stage was designed for producing reinforced lightweight walls which reinforced with various types of wire meshes and contains 4 light bricks having dimensions of 400 mm width, 200 mm length and 40 mm thickness with interspaces to investigate the effect of selected parameters on the behavior of ferrocement wall bearing elements. The selected parameters included: casting and testing of nine specimens having the dimensions of 100 mm x 500 mm x 1000 mm under distributed compression loadings. The test specimens were designated into four groups depend on type and number of reinforcing steels meshes in each ferrocement layer, and the pattern of steel reinforcement according to types of reinforcing steel mesh, welded wire meshes , and expanded wire meshes. • A theoretical NLFEA second study was executed using Ansys2019-R1. The theoretical study aims to produce a proper simulation for the experimental study by analyzing and comparing the results of the theoretical with that of the experimental ones. The lightweight ferrocement walls that reinforced with welded and expanded wire meshes have showed enhancement ratios in all mechanical properties with respect to control wall W1 with no mesh, that was due to the superior advantages of using ferrocement technology. Using expanded steel meshes showed higher ratios of enhancement in mechanical properties with respect to welded steel meshes, that was due to the bigger diameter of the expanded steel mesh. It is interesting to note that combining welded and expanded steel wire meshes showed superior mechanical properties. Using welded steel meshes showed better cracking behavior and higher reduction ratios in cracks widths than using expanded steel meshes. The NLFEA models that used to compare the experimental wall specimens have showed a good agreement with approximately ratio of 88 %. eywords: Ferrocement; Lightweight walls; Cracking; Ductility; Finite element analysis; Steel Meshes; Expanded steel mesh; Welded steel mesh. |