Determination of material parameters of a textile reinforced composite using an inverse method

INTRODUCTION Textile reinforced concrete (TRC) is essentially composed of two brittle materials. In this case a random distributed glass fibre textile is used in combination with an inorganic phosphate cement matrix. TRC composites exhibit a high ductility in combination with a high tensile strength and thus provide an interesting new material for load bearing construction purposes. Moreover, the behaviour of the composite can be tailored to the needs of the mechanical applications. Freeform architecture and lightweight construction elements (e.g. sandwich panels with TRC faces[1]) only represent a small part of the construction types where the advantageous of this material could be exploited. However, in order to design and optimize such type of constructions it is necessary to develop an inverse method to obtain the material parameters from a simple experiment.