Conditions of Multiple Cracking for Polypropylene Discontinuous Fiber Reinforced Cementitious Composites Manufactured by Extrusion Molding.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a fracture mechanics based micromechanics model for predicting the mechanical properties of polypropylene discontinuous fiber reinforced cementitious composites manufactured by extrusion molding. The mechanical properties of the polypropylene fiber composite were measured by conducting tensile tests and four-point flexural tests. SEM observation has shown that approximately 80% of incorporated fibers in the composite was aligned with respect to the extrusion direction. It has been demonstrated that the critical fiber volume fraction for multiple crarking, V_{f, crit} predicted by our micromechanics model was close to the experimentally determined value.