Asbestos fibres, tensile properties

Asbestos cements may be considered as one of the oldest man-made fibre-reinforced materials. They were already being produced in 1900 at a time when other fibre-reinforced composites were not known. Natural inorganic asbestos fibres were used only with neat cement paste and a composite material was obtained with high tensile and flexural strength and several other excellent mechanical properties see Section 5.2. 

Andonian etal. [27] used the composite materials approach, in the form of the rule of mixtures, to account for the strength properties of the composite. They used the same concepts as those described for asbestos-cement composites (Eqs 9.8 and 9.9, Chapter 9), namely, that strength can be calculated as the sum of the effects of the matrix and the fibres the fibre contribution is governed by pull-out and is a function of r /c/, while the matrix contribution is a function of the strength of a void-free matrix, umo, multiplied by its solid content, (1 - Vq). Therefore, For tensile strength ... 

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