The Effect of Woven Fiberglass Mesh Jacketing on Compressive Behaviour of Lightweight Foamed Concrete

Abstract

Utilization of concrete as a building element already synonym in the worldwide construction industry. From ancient
time, many innovations of concrete technology have been done to produce a better quality of building development.
Lightweight foamed concrete (LFC) is one of it. Even though this type of concrete possesses many advantages, but
its strength still considered low compared to the normal concrete. Thus, in this research study, authors will reveal the
improvements of LFC behaviour in term of its compressive strength by confining the LFC with woven fiberglass
mesh. 3 different densities (600 kg/m3
, 1100 kg/m3
, and 1600 kg/m3
) of LFC were cast and confined with 1 to 3
layers of 160 g/m2
of woven fiberglass mesh to investigate its enhancements. The mixed design for this test was
fixed to 1.1:5 (cement to sand) and 0.45 for water. As the results, enhancement of 153% (600 kg/m3
), 97%
(1100kg/m3
), and 102% (1600 kg/m3
) were obtained for the compressive strength of LFC confined with 1 to 3 layers
of woven fiberglass mesh. This shows that confinement of woven fiberglass mesh gives positive impact to the
compressive behaviour of LFC and influenced by the number of layers employed.