During March 2016, Prof Billy Boshoff attended a Rilem workshop on the creep of cracked fibre reinforced concrete (FRC) in Valencia, Spain. This is an important research field for the Unit for Construction Materials (UCM) as Prof Boshoff was the first to publish about the phenomenon in tension. The workshop consisted of 20 presentations with participants from 16 different countries. Prof Boshoff's contributions were two papers about the mechanisms causing this additional creep on the single fibre level, for both steel and synthetic fibres respectively.
A Rilem Technical Committee 261-CCF named Creep behaviour in Cracked Sections of Fibre Reinforced Concrete was created two years ago and most of the participants of the workshop are also members of this committee. The aim of the committee is to create a State-of-the-Art Report and also produce some guidelines on how the creep should be included in the design of structural concrete containing fibres. To reach this goal an inter-laboratory study is currently underway where flexural and tensile creep tests are done on cracked FRC in laboratories across the world. UCM is also taking part in this study.
The next meeting of the Rilem technical committee will be at the Befib Conference in September 2016 in Vancouver, Canada and UCM will be represented.
