Structural assessment of a novel carpet composite material.

摘要

Noise pollution caused by vehicles has always been a concern to the communities in the vicinity of highways and busy roadways. The carpet composite material was recently developed and proposed to be utilized as sound-walls in highways. In the carpet composite material post-consumer carpet is used as reinforcing element inside and epoxy matrix. The main focus of this work is to assess flexural behavior of this novel material. Tests were performed on the individual components of the composite material. Using the results from the test and a theoretical approach, a model was proposed that describes the flexural behavior and also a close estimate of the flexural strength of the carpet composite material. In this work the contribution of the carpet in flexural behavior of the composite material was investigated. It was found that the carpet is weaker than the epoxy and the contribution of the carpet in flexural strength of the composite material is small. It was also found that using the carpet inside the epoxy results in 63% decrease in ultimate strength of the section, however; the gain in ductility is considerable. Based on the flexural test results the composite section follows a bilinear behavior. To determine the capacity of the composite, the effective epoxy section is to be determined before and after the tension cracks form at the bottom of the section. Using the epoxy section analysis described in this work, the strength of the composite section can be calculated at cracking and ultimate capacity.