mm

1. Behavior of Sisal Fiber Concrete Cylinders Externally
Wrapped With Jute FRP
Haozhi Tan,1
Libo Yan,2,3
Liang Huang,1
Ying Wang,4
Hang Li,1
Jia-yi Chen5
1
College of Civil Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, Hunan 410082, China
2
Department of Organic and Wood-Based Construction Materials, Technical University of Braunschweig,
Hopfengarten 20, Braunschweig 38102, Germany
3
Department of Light and Environmentally-Friendly Structures, Fraunhofer Wilhelm-Klauditz-Institut WKI,
Bienroder Weg 54E, Braunschweig 38108, Germany
4
China Machinery International Engineering Design & Research Institute Co., Ltd, Changsha, Hunan 410000,
China
5
School of Environmental Science and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China
The use of environmentally friendly natural fibers as
building materials is benefit to achieve a sustainable
construction. This article performs a study on the use
of natural jute fibers as reinforcement of concrete and
natural sisal fibers in fiber reinforced polymer (FRP)
composites as concrete confinement, i.e. sisal
fiber reinforced concrete (SFRC) composite column
wrapped by jute FRP (JFRP) (SFRC-JFRP). Uniaxial
compression test was conducted to assess the com-
pression performance of the composite columns as
axial structural member. A total of 24 specimens were
tested. The effects of JFRP wrapping thickness and
sisal fiber inclusion on the compressive performance
of the composite columns were investigated. Results
indicate that JFRP confinement significantly increases
the compressive strength and ductility of both PC and
SFRC with an increase in JFRP thickness. Besides, the
inclusion of sisal fiber further enhances the strength
as well as the efficiency of confinement under uniaxial
compression. Also, the models for ultimate strength
and ultimate strain of PC-JFRP and SFRC-JFRP
are proposed. POLYM. COMPOS., 00:000–000, 2015. V
C 2015
Society of Plastics Engineers
INTRODUCTION
Recently, natural fibers have been widely used as rein-
forcement in fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) composites
to replace carbon/glass fibers in engineering applications
[1]. Natural fibers, such as jute, sisal, flax, hemp, are low
cost fibers with low density and readily available. In addi-
tion, they maintain comparable mechanical properties to
those of glass fibers used as reinforcement [2, 3]. Ku
et al. [4] reported that the tensile strength of jute is up to
773 MPa which is very close to that of the glass fiber.
Thus, there is high possibility to use jute FRP (JFRP) to
replace glass FRP (GFRP) in engineering application.
Nowadays, the use of composites columns, especially
concrete wrapped with FRPs, has gained popularity in
high-rise buildings and high seismic risk regions due to
the high strength-to-weight ratio and increased deform-
ability [5]. Many authors have provided analytical models
aiming to describe the response of externally confined
specimens. Among this, design-oriented and analysis-
oriented stress–strain models developed by Lam and Teng
[6] and Teng et al. [7, 8] can be considered. A design-
oriented stress–strain model [6] is formulated including
the actual hoop strain in FRP jackets at rupture and the
significant strength improvement with the sufficient FRP
confinement [7]. An analysis-oriented stress–strain model
is developed for FRP confined concrete [8] considering
the interaction between the concrete core and the FRP
jacket. Regard to experimental studies, Xiao and Wu [9]
did axial compression test on concrete cylinders confined
Correspondence to: Liang Huang; e-mail: huangliangstudy@126.com
Contract grant sponsor: Science Foundation for Distinguished Young
Scholars of Hunan Province, China; contract grant number: 2015JJ1004.
DOI 10.1002/pc.23761
Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com).
V
C 2015 Society of Plastics Engineers
POLYMER COMPOSITES—2015

2. by carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) composite
jackets. It is found that CFRP composite jackets increased
the compression strength and ductility of concrete signifi-
cantly. Amir and Sami [10–12] studied the behavior of
axially loaded concrete-filled GFRP tubes. The results
indicated that concrete-filled GFRP tubes provide an
encouraging confinement and maintain a high level of
ductility. Mohamed et al. [13] investigated behavior of
concrete columns confined with fiber-reinforced polymer
(GFRP and CFRP) tubes. They concluded that external
confinement of concrete by FRP tubes can significantly
enhance the strength, ductility and energy absorption
capacity of concrete.
Most of the research mentioned focused on G/CFRP,
to the best of authors’ knowledge, in the literature, for
natural FRP composites, only flax fibers in the form of
pre-fabricated tube were considered as confinement of
concrete [14–24], so far, no studies have dealt with con-
crete specimens confined with wrapping jute fibers. Com-
pared with conventional synthetic glass or carbon fibers,
jute and sisal fibers offer further advantages such as
lower cost, high impact resistance, high tensile and flex-
ural strength-to-weight ratios, high toughness and fracture
energy [25–27]. Among these fibers, sisal is of particular
interest because its composites have high impact strength
as well as moderate tensile and flexural properties com-
pared to other natural fibers [25–27]. Therefore, an exper-
imental investigation is performed to investigate the
compressive behavior of sisal fiber reinforced concrete
(SFRC) composite cylinders wrapped by jute FRP
(termed as SFRC-JFRP). The experimental results are
also compared with those on plain concrete (PC) compos-
ite cylinders wrapped by JFRP.
MATERIALS AND EXPERIMENTAL TECHNIQUES
Materials
In this study, commercial bidirectional woven jute fab-
ric (480 g/m2
) was obtained from HAINING YUTEX Co.,
Ltd. The epoxy used was CH-1A, which is specifically
designed for use in a variety of resin infusion processes.
The properties of CH-1A are listed in Table 1.
Experimental Techniques
Three different layer arrangements of JFRP tube were
considered: one layer, three layers and five layers. Tensile
properties of JFRP composites were determined by a flat
coupon test on MTS machine according to ASTM D3039
[28]. The physical and mechanical properties of JFRP
composites are displayed in Table 2.
All specimens can be divided into two types: PC and
SFRC. The design of both types of concrete followed
ACI Standard 211.1 [29]. The water–cement ratio of the
concrete was 0.58. The maximum size of the coarse
aggregate was 18 mm. For SFRC, the sisal fibers had
been treated and cut into a length of 40 mm, which were
added to PC during mixing. The considered sisal fiber
weight content was 0.3% of the mass of the cement. For
each confined cylinder, the concrete was casted before
wrapping jute fiber sheets around it. The JFRP was made
by hand lay-up of unidirectional jute fiber sheets on
epoxy saturated surfaces with paintbrushes or rollers to
fully saturate the layers with epoxy. The overlap length
of JFRP was 300 mm. Two narrow jute fiber sheets were
wrapped around both ends of the JFRP sheets to avoid
the premature failure of the specimens. The major fabri-
cation procedure is shown in Fig. 1. Table 3 lists the
material properties of the concrete.
Compression Testing
A total of 24 cylindrical specimens were constructed
and tested under uniaxial compression to investigate the
compressive behaviour of SFRC-JFRP. Nine SFRCs were
wrapped by JFRP with one (1L-SFRC-JFRP), three (3L-
SFRC-JFRP) and five (5L-SFRC-JFRP) layers. For
comparison, 9 PCs were wrapped by JFRP with one (1L-
PC-JFRP), three (3L-PC-JFRP) and five (5L-PC-JFRP)
layers, as well as 3 PCs and 3 SFRC cylinders were used.
The test variables are JFRP plies and sisal fiber inclusion.
Test matrix of the specimens for this study is listed in
Table 4. In the table, ‘PC-JFRP’ indicates PC wrapped by
JFRP and ‘SFRC-JFRP’ indicates sisal fiber reinforced
concrete wrapped by JFRP, respectively. All the speci-
mens were tested using a high-stiffness compression test-
ing machine at the Structural Laboratory of Hunan
University. The concrete cylinders were tested under dis-
placement control mode with a constant rate of 0.25 mm/
min. The acquired data included the applied axial load, P,
axial deformation of concrete, and transverse and axial
strains of the JFRP. As shown in Fig. 2, to obtain data
without the influence, which included the possible imper-
fect contacts and the end confinement, as well as the fric-
tion between the ends of the specimens and the loading
platens, the axial deformation of the concrete was
TABLE 1. Properties of epoxy system.
Properties Epoxy system
Epoxy CH1-A
Mix ratio by weight Resin: Hardener 5 10:5
Viscosity at 25 8C (cP) 1200-1400
Density (g/cm3
) 1.02
TABLE 2. Physical and mechanic properties of JFRP composites.
Layers
FRP
thickness
(mm)
Tensile
strength
(MPa)
Tensile
modulus
(GPa)
Tensile
strain
(E)
1 0.8 83.58 2.59 0.0319
3 2.4 90.43 2.67 0.0339
5 4.0 96.32 2.79 0.0348
2 POLYMER COMPOSITES—2015 DOI 10.1002/pc

3. measured for the middle portion with a gauge length of
150 mm, using two linear variable displacement trans-
ducers (LVDT). For each JFRP-confined specimen, four
hoop strain gauges with a gauge length of 10 mm and four
axial strain gauges with a gauge length of 20mm were
installed at the middle portion of the specimen (Fig. 3).
Note that despite the jacket was not directly bearing the
loading plates at the ends, some axial stress exists in the
JFRP due to the bond transfer between JFRP and concrete.
The axial stress in the JFRP composite is considered insig-
nificant compared to that in the concrete as well as the cir-
cumferential stress in the JFRP. Readings of the load,
strain gauges and LVDTs were achieved using a data log-
ging system and were stored in a computer.
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In this section, the compression strengths of specimens
are listed in Table 5. The axial stress–strain relationship
and the failure modes of specimens are also shown in the
form of figures.
Plain concrete Specimens
Figure 4 shows the stress–strain relationship of the uncon-
fined PC and unconfined SFRC. It can be observed that the
average peak stress of SFRC is 21.0 MPa and a correspond-
ing deformation of 0.28%, which is larger than 19.6 MPa and
0.20% of PC. Besides, it was found that the failure pattern of
the PC was quite different from that of SFRC. After failed,
the PC core was completely crushed. However, SFRC core
was only damaged with macro-cracks but still integrally held
together by the sisal fibers. This phenomenon indicates that
sisal fiber inclusion can effectively restrict the propagation of
the cracks in the concrete core.
Specimen PC-JFRP
The axial compressive stress–strain curve of PC-JFRP
is displayed in Fig. 5. For one layer of JFRP, an obvious
increase in the bearing compressive load, compared to the
case of unconfined PC, is observed. The average peak
stress increased from 19.6 MPa to 23.2 MPa, with a cor-
responding strain of 0.58%, which is two times than the
strain of unconfined PC.
FIG. 1. Primary fabrication procedure of specimens.
TABLE 3. Material properties of the concrete.
Specimens
Average cube
compressive
strength (MPa)
Average prism
compressive
strength (MPa)
Average
Elastic
modulus (GPa)
PC 25.7 19.5 21.7
SFRC 26.8 20.3 22.5
DOI 10.1002/pc POLYMER COMPOSITES—2015 3

4. Regard to three layers of JFRP wraps, specimens show
further increase in the strength to 26.56 MPa if compared
to 1L-PC-JFRP. Besides, the ultimate deformation is
1.08%, two times larger than that of 1L-PC-JFRP and
four times larger than that of unconfined PC. For the
cases of five layers, a further increase of peak load at
31.1 MPa is found. In this case, the ultimate strain
increases to 1.41%, almost five times larger than that of
unconfined PC. In this study, confinement effectiveness
of the confined concrete (defined as the ratio of the ulti-
mate compression strength of the confined PC or the con-
fined sisal fiber reinforced concrete to that of the peak
compression strength of PC) of the specimens are given
in Table 5. As can be seen, the confinement effectiveness
is 1.18, 1.36 and 1.59 respectively for the confined PC
specimen with one-layer, three-layer and five-layer JFRP
composites. It is clear that the increase of confinement
effectiveness is directly proportional to an increase in the
number of JFRP layers.
In terms of the shapes of curves, the curves showed in
the Fig. 5 can be easily divided into three parts, two
linear regions connected by a nonlinear transition region.
In the first linear part, the stress–strain behaviour of PC-
JFRP is similar to the corresponding unconfined PC. In
this stage, the stress increases dramatically with the
increase of strain. Despite that, the applied axial stress is
low, and lateral expansion of the confined PC is too small
to put the confinement of JFRP wraps in work. When the
applied stress approaches the peak strength, considerable
micro-cracks were propagated in concrete and the lateral
expansion significantly increased. At this time, the curve
FIG. 2. Test setup.
FIG. 3. Location of strain gauges. [Color figure can be viewed in the
online issue, which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com.]
TABLE 4. Test matrix of the specimens considered in this study.
Specimen
group
No. of
specimens
No. of
fabric
layers
Core
diameter
D (mm)
Length
(mm)
PC 3 – 150 300
SFRC 3 – 150 300
1L-PC-JFRP 3 1 150 300
3L-PC-JFRP 3 3 150 300
5L-PC-JFRP 3 5 150 300
1L-SFRC-JFRP 3 1 150 300
3L-SFRC-JFRP 3 3 150 300
5L-SFRC-JFRP 3 5 150 300
4 POLYMER COMPOSITES—2015 DOI 10.1002/pc

5. enters the nonlinear transition stage and the confinement
of JFRP wraps start working. When the confinement of
JFRP wraps is fully activated, the strength and ductility
of concrete enhance considerably, this belongs to the third
part. At this part, the hoop tensile stress in the JFRP
wraps increases with the increase of axial stress. The fail-
ure of JFRP wraps occurs after the hoop stress exceeding
the ultimate tensile strength of JFRP wraps obtained from
the flat coupon tensile test.
Figure 6 shows the failure modes observed in the con-
fined PC-JFRP specimens: the failure of specimens under
uniaxial compression was initiated at the middle height of
the JFRP and progressed towards its top and bottom ends.
The rupture of external wraps was then occurred with a sud-
den cut of fibers along the length of the specimens. After
the failure of specimens, only a single crack was observed
and this crack propagated along the fiber direction.
Specimen SRFC-JFRP
Figure 7 shows the axial compressive stress–strain
relationship of SFRC-JFRP specimens. The failure mode
of SFRC-JFRP is displayed in Fig. 8. According to the
figures, the response and failure mode of SFRC-JFRP is
similar to that of PC-JFRP, except for the maximum com-
pressive bearing load and ultimate strain. For unconfined
sisal reinforce concrete SFRC, the peak load is 21.0 MPa,
which is slightly larger to that of unconfined PC. At the
same time, the ultimate deformation of SFRC is 0.38%,
which is slightly larger than that of unconfined PC as
well. For the cases of different layers SFRC-JFRP, Both
peak stress and corresponding strain show the same trend.
The maximum strength of 1, 3, 5 layers SFRC is 23.8
MPa, 28.2MPa, 34.3 MPa respectively, with the corre-
sponding strain 0.69%, 1.27% and 1.68%, respectively.
Table 5 shows that the confinement effectiveness of one-
layer, three-layer and five-layer JFRP confined SFRC
concrete is 1.21, 1.44 and 1.75, respectively. Compared
with the values of confinement effectiveness of PC con-
fined by the same layers of JFRP (i.e., 1.18, 1.36, and
1.59, respectively), it can be concluded that the sisal fiber
inclusion further improves the confinement effectiveness
of the concrete. Sisal fibers within concrete can bridge
the macro-cracks of the concrete and also provide an
effective secondary reinforcement for the crack control of
the concrete which in turn increase in the ultimate com-
pression stress of the confined concrete.
Confinement Performance
Coefficient of confinement is an important parameter to
investigate the compression properties of concrete
TABLE 5. Compressive parameters of the specimens.
Specimen type f0
co (MPa) eco (%) f0
cu (MPa) ecu (%) f0
cu
f0
co
fl;a (MPa) Ductilityecu=Eco
PC 19.6 0.28 – – – – –
SFRC 21.0 0.39 – – – – –
1L-PC-JFRP 19.6 0.28 23.2 0.58 1.18 0.89 2.07
3L-PC-JFRP 19.6 0.28 26.6 1.08 1.36 2.89 3.86
5L-PC -JFRP 19.6 0.28 31.1 1.42 1.59 5.14 5.07
1L-SFRC-JFRP 21.0 0.39 23.8 0.69 1.21 0.89 1.77
3L-SFRC-JFRP 21.0 0.39 28.2 1.27 1.44 2.89 3.26
5L-SFRC-JFRP 21.0 0.39 34.3 1.68 1.75 5.14 4.31
FIG. 4. Axial stress–strain behavior of unconfined specimens. [Color
figure can be viewed in the online issue, which is available at wileyonli-
nelibrary.com.]
FIG. 5. Axial stress–strain behavior of PC-JFRP. [Color figure can be
viewed in the online issue, which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.
com.]
DOI 10.1002/pc POLYMER COMPOSITES—2015 5

6. cylinders. Lam and Teng [6] have proposed the Eqs. 1a
and 1b to calculate the improvement of the wrapped con-
crete cylinders in compressive strength and ultimate strain.
f0
cc
f0
co
5 1 1 k1
fl;a
f0
co
(1a)
ecc
eco
5 1 1 k2
fl;a
f0
co
(1b)
where k1 is the confinement effectiveness coefficient and
k2 is strain enhancement coefficient. f0
co and f0
cc stand for
the peak compressive strength of the unconfined concrete
and confined concrete respectively. Eco and Ecc is the
axial strain for unconfined concrete and confined concrete
at the corresponding peak compressive strength. fl;a is the
lateral pressure between JFRP wraps and concrete and is
calculated using Eq. 2.
fl; a 5
2ffrpt
d
(2)
where ffrp is the JFRP material tensile strength in the
hoop direction. t is the thickness of the wrapped JFRP. d
is the diameter of the cylinder. The compressive parame-
ters of the specimens are displayed in Table 5.
As shown in Fig. 9a, the coefficient of the confinement
k1 of SFRC-JFRP is 2.475, which is larger than 1.861 of
PC-JFRP. This indicates that the effective confinement of
SFRC-JFRP is better than normal RC cylinders wrapped
by JFRP. This is due to that sisal fiber included in the
concrete effectively limits the lateral expansion of con-
crete core. Thus, the failure of JFRP wraps delayed, lead-
ing to the better confinement than normal RC cylinders
wrapped by JFRP. For the enhancement of the ultimate
strain k2, the value of SFRC-JFRP is 12.48, which is
smaller than 13.76 of PC-JFRP [Fig. 9b). This indicates
that sisal fiber included in the concrete does not increase
the enhancement of the ultimate strain. Therefore, the
proposed models for ultimate strength and ultimate strain
of PC-JFRP are shown in Eqs. 3a and 3b, while those of
SFRC-JFRP are expressed as Eqs. 4a and 4b:
FIG. 6. Typical failure mode of PC-JFRP. [Color figure can be viewed
in the online issue, which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com.]
FIG. 7. Axial stress–strain behavior of SFRC-JFRP. [Color figure can
be viewed in the online issue, which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.
com.]
FIG. 8. Typical failure mode of SFRC-JFRP. [Color figure can be
viewed in the online issue, which is available at wileyonlinelibrary.com.]
6 POLYMER COMPOSITES—2015 DOI 10.1002/pc

7. f0
cc
f0
co
5111:861
fl;a
f0
co
(3a)
ecc
eco
51113:76
fl;a
f0
co
(3b)
f0
cc
f0
co
5112:475
fl;a
f0
co
(4a)
ecc
eco
51112:48
fl;a
f0
co
(4b)
Tables 6 and 7 show the comparison of experimental
ultimate strength of PC-JFRP and SFRC-JFRP with the
prediction obtained from the proposed models. In order to
investigate the accuracy of the proposed model, the model
accuracy classification proposed by Yan and Chouw [15]
is used in this article. Three categories of accuracy are
made. When the error is not bigger than 15%, it belongs
to good accuracy. If the error is bigger than 15% but not
bigger than 30%, it indicates the relative accuracy. How-
ever if the error is bigger than 30%, the model is inaccur-
acy. According to the results, the proposed strength
models of PC-JFRP and SFRC-JFRP have good accuracy.
Especially for SFRC-JFRP, the largest error is only 2.5%.
Regarding to strain models, SFRC-JFRP has better accu-
racy than that of PC-JFRP. Nevertheless, both PC-JFRP
and SFRC-JFRP strain models are accurate to predict the
ultimate strain. Tables 8 and 9 give the comparisons
between experimental and predicted ultimate strain of the
specimens.
Ductility
The axial strain ratio of the confined concrete to that of
the unconfined concrete is usually used to evaluate the
ductility of G/CFRP confined concrete [12]. The calculated
ductility of each specimen is displayed in Table 5. We can
easily get from the table that the ductility of PC-JFRP is
greater than SFRC-JFRP. For each different layer, the
FIG. 9. Confinement effect of concrete cylinders: (a) strength enhance-
ment (b) strain enhancement.
TABLE 6. Comparison of experimental results and proposed PC-JFRP
strength models.
Models
PC-JFRP
One-
layer Error
Three-
layer Error
Five-
layer Error
Test results 23.2 – 26.6 – 31.1 –
PC-JFRP 20.7 10.7% 23.1 13.2% 25.7 17.4%
Note: error5j (prediction)-test)/testj*100%
TABLE 7. Comparison of experimental results and proposed
SFRC-JFRP strength models.
Models
SFRC-JFRP
One-
layer Error
Three-
layer Error
Five-
layer Error
Test results 23.8 – 28.2 – 34.3 –
PC-JFRP 23.2 2.5% 28.2 0% 33.7 1.7%
TABLE 8. Comparison of experimental results and proposed PC-JFRP
strain models.
Models
PC-JFRP
One-
layer Error
Three-
layer Error
Five-
layer Error
Test results 0.58% – 1.08% – 1.42% –
PC-JFRP 0.46% 20.1% 0.84% 21.3% 1.29% 9.2%
TABLE 9. Comparison of experimental results and proposed SFRC-
JFRP strain models.
Models
SFRC-JFRP
One-
layer Error
Three-
layer Error
Five-
layer Error
Test results 0.69% – 1.27% – 1.68% –
PC-JFRP 0.60% 13.0% 1.06% 16.5% 1.58% 6.0%
DOI 10.1002/pc POLYMER COMPOSITES—2015 7

8. ductility of PC-JFRP is 2.07, 3.86, and 5.07 for one-layer,
three-layer and five-layer, which is larger than 1.77, 3.26,
and 4.31 of the corresponding SFRC-JFRPs. Therefore,
sisal fiber inclusion decreased the ductility of concrete cyl-
inders. This is due to that the sisal fiber included in the
concrete core could not provide the deformation ability to
the whole specimen. Besides, the ductility of the specimens
increased with more layers of wrapping JFRP. For PC-
JFRP, the ductility of three-layer specimen is 1.86 times
larger than one-layer specimen. The ductility of five-layer
specimen is even 2.45 times larger than one-layer speci-
men. We can get the same situation in SFRC-JFRP as
well. The ductility of one-layer specimen is only 54.3% of
the ductility of three-layer specimen and 41.1% of the duc-
tility of five-layer specimen.
CONCLUSIONS
In this study, the compressive behaviour of PC and
SFRC cylinders wrapped by natural jute fabric reinforced
polymer (JFRP) was experimentally investigated. Based
on the test results and analysis, the following conclusions
were drawn:
1. JFRP wrapping increases the compressive strength of both
PC and SFRC significantly with an increase in JFRP
layers, i.e. the increase in ultimate compressive strength
for one, three, and five layer JFRP is 18.4%, 35.7%, and
58.7%, respectively. Besides, the inclusion of sisal fiber
further enhances the strength of the member, i.e. com-
pared with the PC, one, three, and five layer JFRP con-
fined PC, the increase is 2.6%, 6.0%, 10.3% for the
corresponding SFRC specimen, respectively.
2. For stress–strain relationship, both PC-JFRP and JFRP-
SFRC specimens under compression behave bi-linear
manner connected by a nonlinear transition region, which
is similar to the typical stress–strain curves of glass or
carbon FRP confined concrete.
3. Sisal fiber inclusion can effectively reduce the propaga-
tion of the cracks in the concrete core for both PC and
JFRP confined PC specimens.
4. Sisal fiber included in the concrete increases the efficiency
of confinement, but does not increases the ultimate strain.
5. Sisal fiber inclusion cannot enhance the ductility, while
the increasing layers improve the ductility of the FRP
wrapping concrete cylinders.
6. The proposed models can predict the ultimate strength
and ultimate strain of PC-JFRP and SFRC-JFRP consid-
ered in this study accurately.
In general, this study shows the feasibility of jute fabric
reinforced polymer composites as external reinforcement
materials of concrete and sisal fiber as reinforcement
within concrete as axial structural members. In the follow-
ing, studies on the feasibility of JFRP as flexural strength-
ening materials of concrete beams and as axial/flexural
strengthening materials of masonry structures will be
investigated. In addition, to have a better understanding of
JFRP and sisal fibers as construction and building materi-
als, their durability will be considered.
NOMENCLATURE
CFRP Carbon fiber reinforced polymer
FRP Fiber reinforced polymer
JFRP Jute FRP
LVDT Linear variable displacement transducers
PC Plain concrete
SFRC Sisal fiber reinforced concrete
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8 POLYMER COMPOSITES—2015 DOI 10.1002/pc