Abstract
The fracture property of concrete is essential for the safety and durability analysis of concrete structures. Investigating the characteristics of the fracture process zone (FPZ) is of great significance to clarify the nonlinear fracture behaviour of concrete. Experimental and numerical investigations on the FPZ of plain concrete in pre-notched beams subjected to three-point bending were carried out. Electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI) technique was used to observe crack evolution and measure the full-field deformation of the beams. The development of the FPZ were evaluated qualitatively and quantitatively based on the in-plane strain contours and displacement field measured by ESPI, respectively. By integrating the cohesive crack model and finite element (FE) model, various tension softening curves (TSCs) were employed to simulate the fracture response of concrete beams. By comparing the deformation obtained by FE simulation and experiments, the TSCs of plain concrete were evaluated and most suitable TSCs of concrete were recommended.
Highlights
Concrete material has been widely used in civil engineering and its fracture property is essential for the safety and durability evaluation of concrete structures
It has been demonstrated that the fracture behavior of concrete exhibits a certain nonlinearity and the existing formula based on linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM) is invalid for concrete material due to the existence of the fracture process zone (FPZ) (Shah, Swartz, & Ouyang, 1995)
Fracture energy is generally considered as a significant parameter in the fracture analysis of concrete structures (Kanomata et al, 2012) and affected by the height of the FPZ (Hu & Duan, 2004), indicating that the presence of the FPZ may be the essential reason for the size effect of fracture energy (Hu, 2002)
Summary
Concrete material has been widely used in civil engineering and its fracture property is essential for the safety and durability evaluation of concrete structures. DIC technique can visualize the surface deformations of material by successive post-processing of digital images (Skarżyński, Syroka, & Tejchman, 2011) and has been widely applied to study the fracture property of concrete structure, such as the FPZ length (Wu, Rong, Zheng, Xu, & Dong, 2011), the FPZ width (Skarżyński & Tejchman, 2010), the local deformation at the steel-concrete interface (Daoud, Maurel, & Laborderie, 2013), deformation monitoring on the surface of reinforced concrete ties By comparing the results obtained by numerical simulation and experiments, the TSCs of plain concrete were evaluated and most suitable TSCs of concrete were recommended
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
