Pervious Concrete Reinforced with Waste Cloth Strips

Pervious concrete is considered an environment-friendly paving material and its main feature is that it allows water to penetrate within its structure. Because of open pores in pervious concrete structures, there is a high risk of corrosion, so this concrete is used without any reinforcement or with fiber reinforcement. The incorporation of fibers in concrete is known to substantially increase the tensile strength, toughness, and ductility of concrete. The fast-fashion trend encourages people to buy more clothes and dispose of them in a shorter period of time, resulting in 85% of clothes ending up in landfills or being burned. In this paper, old cotton T-shirts were cut into narrow strips about 5 ± 1 cm long for the purpose of reinforcing pervious concrete. A total of eight concrete mixtures were made: four without reinforcement and four with textile-strip reinforcement. The number of textile strips was 1% of the total volume. Tests carried out on the specimens were: slump, density, porosity, compressive and flexural strength, water absorption, infiltration rate, and abrasion resistance. Multi-slice computed tomography (MSCT) was used for an X-ray examination and quantitative analysis of the specimens (ROI; region of interest) and 3D visualization (VRT; volume rendering technique). With an X-ray examination, the large holes in the cross sections of the specimens have been observed. They were caused by an insufficient compaction effort during the specimens’ placement, which affected the test results. Based on the obtained laboratory results, the waste strips improved the compressive strength, flexural strength, and abrasion resistance of the concrete with the addition of fine fractions, and generally increases the ductility of pervious concrete.