Mechanical behaviour analysis of polyester polymer mortars reinforced with tire rubber fibres

Tires effective reutilization has become an important research topic in recent years due to the stockpiles increase that creates environmental problems. Recent European regulations forbid the tires burning and landfilling, setting several recycling objectives. Within this context, the reutilization of tire rubber recyclates into cement and polymer concrete materials, as reinforcement or aggregate replacement, has received lately a great attention. The present work aim is to analyse the modifications induced by tire rubber addition in the mechanical properties of polyester based polymer mortars (PM). The effect of different tire rubber fibre amounts (0.1, 0.4 and 0.5 wt.%) were analysed in this investigation. Plain polymer mortar was also prepared for comparison. Mechanical behaviour of both reinforced and plain polymer mortars formulations was assessed by flexural and compressive tests. Flexural and compressive strength improvements were particularly significant for PM trial formulation reinforced with the higher amount of tire rubber fibres. The observed trend on mechanical properties seems to indicate that higher increases could be achieved with higher amounts of tire rubber fibres. Thus, further experiments will be required in order to determine the critical amounts of rubber fibre reinforcement that define the turning points on material trend behaviour of PM.