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Received Nov 30, 2017; Revised Jan 19, 2018; Accepted Jan 24, 2018
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1. Introduction
The primary shortcomings of cement mixtures, paste, and concrete are low tensile strength, low ultimate elongation, and high brittleness. However, fibre has a high tensile strength and a large elongation. Incorporating fibres into concrete increases the tensile, bending, and impact strengths of the concrete as well as its elongation and toughness. Three types of fibres are used in fibre-reinforced concrete, each with different properties: steel fibre, inorganic fibre, and organic fibre. Among them, steel fibre-reinforced concrete is the most studied and widely used material; it is also the best developed fibre-reinforced concrete [1, 2]. The development of fibre-reinforced concrete started in the early 20th century. From 1907 to 1908, Некрасоъ, an expert from the Russian Empire, incorporated steel fibres into concrete, thus heralding the development of steel fibre-reinforced concrete. In 1910, Porter in the United States published the first paper on short steel fibre-reinforced concrete; he proposed distributing the short fibre evenly throughout the concrete to reinforce it. The material structure Porter proposed was generally the same as the steel fibre-reinforced concrete used today. In 1911, Graham in the United States preliminarily and experimentally demonstrated the superior mechanical properties of steel fibre-reinforced concrete and concluded that incorporating steel fibres can improve the strength and volume stability of concrete. In 1940s, scholars and engineers in Britain, the United States, France, Germany, and other countries applied and were awarded a series of patents on methodologies for improving concrete performance by incorporating steel fibres, thus enhancing the manufacturing process of the steel fibre and improving the shape of the steel fibre to enhance its bonding with the concrete matrix. During the Second World War, Japanese scholars and engineers also studied steel fibre-reinforced concrete and used it in explosion-proof structures [3] for military purposes.
In the early 1960s, research on the applications of fibre-reinforced concrete in engineering was widely conducted. In 1963, Romualdi and Baston in the United States published a series of reports on the mechanism of steel fibres for enhancing crack resistance [4]....