Today, the building industry makes a major contribution to global warming and increas- ing scarcity of resources. Hence, it is urgent to foster application of new construction materials in modern infrastructures. Such materials have a great potential to reduce the…
Today, the building industry makes a major contribution to global warming and increas- ing scarcity of resources. Hence, it is urgent to foster application of new construction materials in modern infrastructures. Such materials have a great potential to reduce the use of resources, while offering a high performance under various exposures. In this context, strain-hardening cement- based composites (SHCC) may play a prominent role since they exhibit ductile behavior under dif- ferent types of mechanical loads, plus they are considered to be very durable due to the reduced ingress of deleterious materials. The last feature can be traced back to small crack widths character- istic for this type of materials. For a safe use of SHCC in the practice of construction, it is necessary to have an extensive knowledge about their mechanical performance and damage mechanisms under cyclic loading con- ditions. Since the fiber deterioration is strongly influenced by the fiber orientation, this parameter deserves to be closely investigated. The article at hand presents first results on the cyclic behavior of SHCC specimens with different fiber inclination angles of 0°, 30° and 60° related to the direction of tensile force. To estimate the effect of the fiber orientation, cyclic tension-swelling tests were performed. The results of monotonic, quasi-static tensile tests served as a reference. Subsequently, the crack surfaces were investigated by means of electron microscopy in order to evaluate the deg- radation of the polymer fibers and the surrounding cementitious matrix.