The Portland cement concrete is a brittle material. Itpossess a very low tensile strength, limited ductility andlittle resistance to cracking.
Internal micro cracks arepresent in concrete and its poor tensile strength is due topropagation of such micro cracks leading to brittle fractionof concrete. In plain concrete and similar brittle materials,structural cracks develop even before loading due to dryingshrinkage and other causes. When load is applied theinternal cracks propagate and open up due to stress andadditional cracks are formed. The development of thiscracks is the cause of inelastic deformation in concrete. Theaddition of small closely spaced and uniformly dispersedfibers to concrete can act as a crack arrester and improvesits static and dynamic properties.
This is known as fiberreinforced concrete, which can also be defined as theconcrete containing fibrous materials which increases itsstructural performance. It contains short discrete particles fibers that are uniformly distributed and randomly oriented.The fibers are of same order of magnitude as aggregateinclusions. Addition of fibers can increase strength and alsoreduce plastic shrinkage and drying shrinkage by arrestingthe propagation of crack.
The development of steelreinforcement has overcome the problem of poor tensilestrength. But it doesn’t completely solve the problem ofmicro cracks due to drying and plastic shrinkage owing toweathering conditions. This let to study on research ofvarious methods to adopt fibers as reinforcement withdifferent fibers. Addition of steel reduced the micro cracksbut over a long period, steel gets corroded due to variousactions. This made the need for enlightenment of usage ofvarious organic and inorganic fibers which are eco friendlyand economic.
According to study of natural fibers,compared to natural inorganic fibers, vegetable fibers(natural organic) are very much renewable , eco-friendly,economical and production cost is also very low. Hencestudy on vegetable fibers with respect to natural inorganicfiber is been carried out in this project The mixes foraddition of different proportions of fiber-cement ratio ofnatural organic(vegetable) fibers are being compared withone of the natural inorganic fibers in concrete with respectto plain concrete for their properties.