Behaviour of Transport Anchors in Thin Textile Reinforced Concrete Panels in Tension and Shear

High Performance Concrete reinforced with technical textile, called textile reinforced concrete, have lesser environmental impact than traditional concrete. The combination of fine-grained concrete and noncorrosive reinforcement allows to design thin attractive elements, in thickness of just few centimetres or millimetres. Such modern materials can help with reducing environmental impacts and CO2 emissions. Textile reinforced concrete is usually used for facade panels or other attractive elements that need to be anchored and transported, but there is limited knowledge about the behaviour of anchors in such thin elements. The standards for designing anchors in concrete are not meant to be used for such thin elements, so there is no document that could help with the design of such parts. In this paper, two types of transport anchors were tested, in tension and in shear, in 40 mm thin concrete plates reinforced with carbon meshes to see their behaviour. Additionally, due to splitting behaviour and inconsistent behaviour, an added spiral reinforcement was designed and tested to improve the performance of anchorage.