Abstract
Fracture mechanics is one of the most important approaches to structural safety analysis. Modeling the fracture process zone (FPZ) is critical to understand the nonlinear cracking behavior of heterogeneous quasi-brittle materials such as concrete. In this work, a nonlinear extended scaled boundary finite element method (X-SBFEM) was developed incorporating the cohesive fracture behavior of concrete. This newly developed model consists of an iterative procedure to accurately model the traction distribution within the FPZ accounting for the cohesive interactions between crack surfaces. Numerical validations were conducted on both of the concrete beam and dam structures with various loading conditions. The results show that the proposed nonlinear X-SBFEM is capable of modeling the nonlinear fracture propagation process considering the effect of cohesive interactions, thereby yielding higher precisions than the linear X-SBFEM approach.
Highlights
With the development of numerical analysis technology, structural fracture mechanics is an important approach to structural safety evaluation
The Fracture process zone (FPZ) consists of microcracks, which are minute individual cracks; this gives rises to the cohesive tractions ahead of the crack tip, which comes from the aggregate interlocking and surface friction
(1) A nonlinear X-SBFEM model using the linear superposition of the iterative method was developed and validated to include the cohesive tractions and the fracture energy from FPZ
Summary
With the development of numerical analysis technology, structural fracture mechanics is an important approach to structural safety evaluation. Fracture process zone (FPZ) is defined as the intermediate space between cracked and uncracked portions of concrete [1]. Different from real cracks, the FPZ can still transmit stress, and the stress, σ, that FPZ transmits decreases with increasing crack open displacement, w. The FPZ consists of microcracks, which are minute individual cracks; this gives rises to the cohesive tractions ahead of the crack tip, which comes from the aggregate interlocking and surface friction. A nonlinear fracture-mechanics-based method needs to be applied to account for the effect of cohesive tractions during the fracture propagations
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