Study of the Effect of Fibre Orientation on Artificially Directed Steel Fibre-Reinforced Concrete

The fibre utilization efficiency of directionally distributed fibre-reinforced concrete is better than that of randomly distributed fibre. However, controlling the fibre direction is difficult, which limits its applications. In this paper, a method in which fibres were artificially directed was used to simulate the feasibility of orienting fibres during 3D concrete printing. Based on artificially directed steel fibre-reinforced concrete specimens, the orientation characteristics of directional fibre-reinforced concrete specimens were studied. The differences between the gravity and the boundary effects in ordinary fibre-reinforced concrete and artificially directed fibre-reinforced concrete were compared. The average orientation coefficient in randomly distributed fibre-reinforced concrete was 0.59, whereas this value in directionally distributed fibre-reinforced concrete was over 0.9. This result demonstrated the feasibility of manually orienting the fibres in steel fibre-reinforced concrete in layer-by-layer casting.