Woven Hybrid Fabrics Turn Weak Mortar Into Flexural Powerhouses, Study Finds

A single sheet of woven fabric can multiply the bending strength of brittle mortar nearly sixfold, but only if its fibers point the right way. That is the central lesson of a new experimental study published in Case Studies in Construction Materials, in which researchers strengthened small mortar elements with three different intraply hybrid composite fabrics and systematically rotated their reinforcement through horizontal, vertical, and diagonal orientations. The results reveal a striking and sometimes counterintuitive truth: the strongest fabric on paper is not the best fabric on a structure, and the direction in which fibers run can matter as much as the fibers themselves.

The work, carried out by Ferit Cakir, Pinar Yildirim, and Mohsen Shams, addresses a longstanding problem in structural rehabilitation. Aging concrete and masonry structures often suffer from deteriorated material, insufficient load-carrying capacity, and limited ability to deform without catastrophic failure. Traditional fixes—jacketing with reinforced concrete or steel—work, but they add significant weight and bulk and demand labor-intensive construction. Fiber-reinforced polymer composites have become the elegant alternative: they are corrosion-resistant, add almost no mass, and can be bonded directly onto existing surfaces. Yet each fiber family has its own Achilles heel. Carbon fibers are stiff and strong but fail suddenly and brittlely. Glass fibers stretch further but are less stiff. Aramid fibers, the stuff of bulletproof vests, absorb enormous energy but struggle in compression and degrade under moisture and ultraviolet light.

Hybridization is the attempt to have it all. Rather than relying on a single fiber type, engineers weave or laminate two fiber families together so that a stiff fiber carries load at small deformations while a tougher, more extensible fiber keeps working after damage begins, delaying unstable fracture. The fabrics used in this study take the concept to its finest scale: intraply hybrids, in which carbon, glass, and aramid yarns are interwoven within the same plain-weave layer, not stacked in separate plies. The team tested three combinations—carbon-glass, aramid-carbon, and glass-aramid—each with a nominal areal weight of 200 grams per square meter. Because both fiber families share the same bonded surface, they can participate simultaneously in load transfer and crack control, a property the authors argue makes intraply architecture especially promising for external strengthening of cementitious elements.

The experimental program was disciplined in its symmetry. Each fabric was bonded with a two-component epoxy in three orientations—horizontal, vertical, and diagonal at 45 degrees—producing nine strengthened configurations, each represented by three specimens. Mortar prisms of 40 by 40 by 160 millimeters were tested in three-point bending, 50-millimeter cubes under axial compression, and cured fabric coupons in direct tension, all following the EN 196-1 and ASTM D3039 standards. Unstrengthened reference specimens established the baseline: 6.66 megapascals of flexural strength and 46.29 megapascals in compression. Crucially, the amount of reinforcement was kept identical across orientations, so any difference in performance could be traced to fiber composition and geometry rather than quantity of material.

The tension tests delivered the first surprise. The aramid-carbon fabric pulled along its horizontal aramid direction was the champion, averaging 178.18 megapascals—nearly six times the 30.82 megapascals of the glass-aramid fabric pulled along its weak aramid direction. Intriguingly, carbon was not the strongest direction in either carbon-containing fabric, a sign that yarn count, crimp, and impregnation quality sculpt each fabric’s directional character as much as the fiber chemistry does. In every hybrid, the diagonal coupon fell between the horizontal and vertical results, exactly what the orthogonal weave predicts when both families share the load at 45 degrees. Statistical analysis confirmed that hybrid system, orientation, and their interaction all shaped tensile strength with overwhelming significance.

But it was the structural tests that rewrote the rankings. Every strengthened prism beat the unconfined reference, with flexural strengths climbing from 16.04 to 39.41 megapascals—gains of 141 to 492 percent. The star was not the aramid-carbon fabric but the carbon-glass hybrid laid diagonally, which reached 39.41 megapascals, almost six times the reference. Under bending, cracks rarely travel perfectly straight; they fork and incline as stresses redistribute. Diagonal reinforcement intercepts those wandering crack paths at multiple points, mobilizing both fiber families at once, spreading damage instead of concentrating it in one fracture plane. The researchers observed precisely this behavior: diagonal specimens developed distributed, inclined cracking, while horizontal and vertical layouts produced a single localized crack that the fabric bridged. In fact, within every hybrid system, the horizontal-versus-vertical ranking in bending mirrored the coupon tensile strength of whichever fiber family ran along the prism axis—a satisfying confirmation that post-cracking flexural capacity is governed by the crack-bridging family.

Compression told a very different and humbling story. Here the fabric does not pull across cracks; it acts as a passive corset, restraining the lateral expansion that Poisson effects generate as the mortar core crushes. Only the fiber family wrapped around the circumference matters, and its performance depended on fit rather than raw strength. Just two configurations beat the reference significantly: carbon-glass vertical, at 53.70 megapascals, a 16 percent gain, and glass-aramid horizontal, at 53.51 megapascals, a 15.6 percent gain. Both placed glass yarns in the hoop direction—a telling detail, because glass’s higher failure strain lets the wrap stretch around square corners and follow the dilating core without rupturing prematurely. Meanwhile, every aramid-carbon layout and the vertical glass-aramid layout significantly reduced compressive strength, with the worst case dropping 40.1 percent. The authors attribute the losses to sharp unrounded corners concentrating stress in the fabric, platens already providing passive restraint at the cube ends, and aramid yarns being difficult to impregnate with epoxy, weakening the confining action.

A two-way factorial analysis of variance formalized the pattern. For compressive strength, the interaction between hybrid system and orientation produced the largest effect of the entire study, with a partial eta-squared of 0.928—meaning the benefit of any given orientation is inseparable from the fibers it positions. The same held for tension and flexure. The researchers are careful about terminology: without single-fiber control fabrics, they cannot claim a quantified synergistic hybrid effect against a rule-of-mixtures baseline, so the differences among fabrics are interpreted as effects of hybrid composition—the specific fiber combinations, proportions, and arrangements within the weave—rather than proven synergy. This candor does not diminish the practical punch of the findings; it sharpens them.

The broader message is one that materials data sheets cannot convey. Direct tensile tests characterize the reinforcement itself, but once a composite is glued to a cementitious substrate, performance emerges from the interplay of matrix cracking, adhesive stress transfer, woven geometry, and the governing failure mechanism. The configuration that wins in tension lost in bending; the one that ruled bending fared poorly in compression. The authors therefore recommend matching the fabric to the demand: diagonal carbon-glass for flexure-dominated members, carbon-glass vertical or glass-aramid horizontal for compression-dominated ones, with carbon-glass vertical the most balanced choice overall—and vertical glass-aramid layouts to be avoided. They also caution that these are laboratory-scale results from homogeneous mortar, with bond behavior, environmental durability, cyclic seismic loading, and full-scale masonry geometry still to be verified. For the aging bridges, walls, and heritage structures that increasingly need help carrying their load, the study offers a deceptively simple design rule: orient the strongest direction of the fabric along the principal tensile stress, whether that runs down a beam or around a column, and let the weave do the rest.

Subject of Research: Structural strengthening of mortar elements using intraply hybrid composite fabrics with varied fiber combinations and reinforcement orientations

Article Title: Structural performance of mortar elements strengthened with intraply hybrid composite fabrics: Combined effects of fiber hybridization and reinforcement orientation

Article References: Structural performance of mortar elements strengthened with intraply hybrid composite fabrics: Combined effects of fiber hybridization and reinforcement orientation. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: hybrid composites, fiber-reinforced polymer, mortar strengthening, flexural strength, confinement, carbon fiber, glass fiber, aramid fiber, fiber orientation, structural rehabilitation, masonry, textile reinforcement