Flexural behaviour of bamboo based ferrocement slab panels with flyash

Abstract There is a need to develop low cost building elements with the help of locally available materials to fulfil the demand of low cost houses. In rural areas the bamboo, available in abundance, may be utilized as replacement of common M.S. or HYSD bars (a costly building material). Flyash, a by-product from thermal power plants can replace cement in normal mortar or concrete. The flexural behaviour of bamboo based ferrocement slab panels reinforced with chicken wire mesh layers has been studied to improve the serviceability limit. Experimental investigations on simply supported ferrocement slab panels subjected to monotonically increasing uniformly distributed load have been investigated. The experimental programme consists of testing 12 ferrocement slab panels of size 470 mm × 940 mm with the thickness of 40 mm and 50 mm each having 6 slabs. Out of these slabs, 6 numbers with conventional mortar 1:3 and 6 after 15% cement replacement by fly ash, with adopting grids of bamboo strips as skeletal reinforcement, were cast, cured under wet gunny bags for 28 days and then tested under uniformly distributed loading and the test results obtained were compared with the theoretical results. Test results show that the first crack load and the experimental failure load have been found almost same for both types of slabs. The ultimate load has been found to be about doubled the first crack loads. All slabs exhibited large ductility before final failure in flexure.