Anisotropic mechanical performance of 3D printed fiber reinforced sustainable construction material

Around the globe, ground breaking projects and case studies are being presented to showcase the potential of digital fabrication with concrete, better known as 3D printing of concrete. With these explorations, underway, the key quest in 3D concrete printing is for structural stability by means of high strength and ductility. This need could be avoided by designing printable fiber reinforcement concrete or concrete with in-process ‘printed’ reinforcement. Therefore, in this paper, an experimental investigation was carried out by reinforcing short glass fiber (GF) of different lengths (3 mm, 6 mm and 8 mm) and percentages (0.25%–1%) in a custom-made sustainable construction material developed for 3D printing application. Thixotropic GF/geopolymer mortar was printed using a 4-Axis gantry system and later loaded in different directions for measuring the mechanical properties. Our experimental results revealed, improved properties of the printed specimens with increase in fiber percentage up to 1% and an obvious directional dependency behaviour, caused by the layer wise deposition.