5 th International Slag Valorisation Symposium | Leuven | 03-05/04/2017 373 MECHANICAL PERFORMANCE OF INORGANIC POLYMER- BASED MORTARS WITH GLASS FIBRE REINFORCED POLYMER BARS Pavel Leonardo LOPEZ GONZALEZ 1 , Valter CARVELLI 2 , Yiannis PONTIKES 1 1 Department of Materials Engineering, KU Leuven, 3001 Heverlee, Belgium 2 Department A.B.C, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milan, Italy pavelleonardo.lopezgonzalez@kuleuven.be, valter.carvelli@polimi.it, yiannis.pontikes@kuleuven.be Introduction Glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) bars have found a place in specific structural applications as concrete reinforcement 1 thanks to certain advantages regarding chemical attack behaviour, corrosion resistance, non-conductive characteristics, high strength/weight ratio and production simplicity 2 . However, the negative effect that elevated temperatures have on the mechanical performance of these bars constrains their spread adoption 3 . In contrast, inorganic polymers (IP) are characterised by a low thermal conductivity, good mechanical performance and stability at elevated temperatures 4 . The aim of the study is the preliminary evaluation of the mechanical interaction between an IP mortar made by alkali activated fayalite slag (FS) and the embedded GFRP bars used for reinforcement, defining the bearing capacity of the dual system under flexural loading. Materials and Methods Four mortar specimens, reinforced with an unidirectional E-glass fibre reinforced polymer (GFRP) bar of diameter 8 mm, were tested in a three point bending setup after 33 days of curing at 25°C and 90% relative humidity. The dimensions of the samples and test setup are presented in Figure 1; load was carried out using a Dartec hydraulic machine (maximum load capacity 5000 kN; 100 kN subcell) with displacement rate set to 1 mm/min. Three of the specimens were made of FS mortar and one was made of traditional Portland cement-sand mortar (OPC); mixture proportioning for each set is presented in Table 1. Digital image correlation technique (DIC) was used to track the 2D full-field displacement and to calculate the strain developed on a lateral side of the specimens during testing. The LIMESS system by “Messtechnik und Software GmbH” was adopted acquiring 2 images per second of the side, with an image size of 1392 x 1040 px. The displacement and strain fields were obtained using VIC-2D software 5 (subset size 40, step size 3, filter size 15).