Japan: Successful Development of Aseismatic Concrete with Plastic Fiber and Increased Toughness

It is reported that Japan Disaster Prevention Science and Technology Research Institute cooperated with Tokyo Institute of Technology to replace gravel in building materials with plastic fibers to make a new type of concrete. Experiments show that the pier model made of this concrete can resist 1.5 times the shaking of the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995.

Ordinary concrete is made by mixing cement with sand and gravel. They made polypropylene, the raw material of household plastic storage boxes, into fibers with a length of 1.2 cm and a section width of 0.03 mm, and mixed them into concrete in a proportion of 1.5% to build a pier model with the same volume as the real one, with a height of 7.5 m and a section width of 1.8 m. Since then, researchers have carried out three experiments on the pier model with the same shaking intensity as the Great Hanshin Earthquake, and then increased the shaking intensity of the shaking table to 1.5 times that of the earthquake.

It was found that there was no damage on the pier model except for 10 small cracks. Experts believe that this is because after mixing polypropylene fibers, the toughness of concrete increases, thus increasing the tensile strength. In the Great Hanshin Earthquake, some viaducts of expressways were overturned. If the viaduct construction materials are manufactured by the above technology, it is expected to improve the seismic strength. The adoption of this new technology may lead to high cost and other problems, as long as the realization of mass production, the cost can be reduced, so if the bridge does not collapse in the earthquake, it will avoid major losses.

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