Incorporating recycled pet fibers for green roof slab panel

Abstract

High consumption of plastics leads to production of large amounts of plastic waste in today’s world and plastic is non-biodegradable so its disposal has been a problem. In order to resolve this problem, recycled PET fibers were proposed to be used as reinforcement in concrete and recent studies show that they can be accepted as successful building material. This paper has discussed the effect of adding recycled plastic fiber (PET) to the precast concrete green roof panels. This research consists of two main stages. In first stage, different volumes of recycled PET fibers, i.e. 0%, 0.5%, 1.0% and 1.5% have been added as percentages of concrete by volume. The results show that the maximum volume of PET fiber for a desired compressive and tensile strength was 1.0%. It was observed that 15.3 % of increase in compressive, 22.44% of increase in flexural strength and 18.77% of increase in split tensile strength for the addition of 1% PET fibers to the concrete. In second stage, optimum fiber percentage (1.0%) selected from stage-1 was used to produce precast concrete panels. To check the structural performance of this slab panel, center-point line loading test and dropping weight test were conducted. Finally, permeability test was conducted to compare the permeability of plain concrete and recycled PET fiber introduced concrete.