High performance of silica fume mortars for ferrocement applications

Abstract EN

The current study deals with obtaining the high performance mortars to use in the applications of ferrocement.

The main problem that has greatly affected the performance of mortar is the workability.

A low water-cement ratio mostly resulted in increases in the compressive strength and led to the enhancement of durability characteristics, but decreases in the workability.

Workability becomes an important factors, as the mortar has to easily penetrate between the layers of the mesh wires.

A reasonably workable with high strength cement mortar can be obtained by using a high cement content coupled with the use of silica fume and super plasticizers.

In this investigation a series of compression tests were conducted on 50 mm cube and 150 ×300 mm, cylindrical specimens to obtain the compressive strength and the stress-strain behavior of mortar with silica fume and super plasticizers and flexural tests were conducted on 50 × 50 × 200 mm prism to obtain the modulus of rupture.

The results of this study indicated that the variation in mortar strength depend on the water-to-binder ratio of the mix and percentages of cement replacing.

The effects of these parameters on the stress-strain curves are presented.

The best replacement percentage of silica is 3% was concluded in this study.

From the experimental results a mathematical model has been developed to predict the 28-day compressive strength of silica fume mortar with different water-tocementitious ratios and superplasticizers percentage.