Fatigue Fracture Investigation of Engineered Cementitious Composites

Abstract

Abstract The fracture failure and crack propagation of engineered cementitious composites (ECC) are analyzed based on extended finite element method (XFEM) simulation and experiment. Three-point bending notched beam under static and fatigue load is employed in this research. As a result, the peak loads in the experiment were consistent with simulation results, while the simulated crack mouth opening displacement (CMOD) values corresponding to the peak loads were generally smaller than the experimental results. In addition, it was observed that a single crack’s propagation occurred along the initial notch in numerical simulation rather than multiple cracks’ propagation. Though the cycle times of fatigue load were short in the simulation of fatigue fracture under low-stress level and high cycle frequency, the loading cycle frequency had a negligible influence on simulation. However, the higher the stress level was, the greater the effect of the loading cycle frequency on the simulation results. A higher loading frequency will reduce the model’s load carrying capacity. The results showed that the XFEM can simulate the crack propagation behavior and get the strain hardening vertical load–CMOD curve of ECC to a certain extent. XFEM provides a convenient way to solve complex practical engineering problems of ECC with the strain hardening property.