Assessment of factors influencing mechanical properties of steel fiber reinforced self-compacting concrete

• Increasing the volume fraction of steel fibers (Vf) decreases the workability of SCC.
• As the Vf increased, compressive strength and modulus of elasticity will be decreased.
• With increase of Vf, tensile and flexural strengths are considerably improved.
• Compressive strength and modulus of elasticity slightly increased with aggregate size.

In the last decade the steel fiber reinforced self-compacting concrete (SFRSCC) has been used in several partially and fully structural applications. This study investigates how the inclusion of steel fibers affects the properties of SFRSCC. For this purpose, an extensive experimental program including different cement contents of 400, 450 and 500 kg/m3, two maximum aggregate sizes of 10 and 20 mm along with steel fiber volume fractions of 0%, 0.38%, 0.64% and 1% was conducted. The water/cement ratio was kept constant at 0.45 for all the mixes studied. Mechanical properties were tested for compressive, splitting tensile and flexural strengths and modulus of elasticity. The results showed that mixture characteristics and volume fraction of steel fibers can significantly affect these major properties. Furthermore, this study represents extensive comparisons using database that have been gathered from a wide variety of international sources reported by many researchers and data obtained experimentally, which came up with about some discrepancies in the results.

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