Confinement of Concrete with FRCM Materials

Fabric-reinforced cementitious matrix (FRCM) composites have recently enter the market as a promising, sustainable, and durable solution for the external strengthening of RC and masonry structural members. In this paper, an analytical study on the confinement of concrete with FRCM materials is presented. To this purpose, a wide database including results of compression tests performed on more than 250 concrete cylinders externally wrapped with FRCM was collected from the literature, firstly to perform an overall analysis of the efficiency of the FRCM confinement by varying some of the relevant parameters, such as: type of fiber (glass, carbon, steel, PBO or basalt) and geometry of the mesh, number of layers, composition of the inorganic matrix and compressive strength of the unconfined concrete. Then, preliminary relationships for estimating the compression strength of FRCM confined concrete were developed through best-fit techniques.