High Deformable Concrete (HDC) element: An experimental and numerical study

Abstract

High deformable concrete (HDC) elements have compressive strength rates equal to conventional concrete and have got a high compressive strain at about 20% to 50%. These types of concrete elements as prefabricated parts have an abundance of applications in the construction industry which is the most used in the construction of tunnels in squeezing grounds, tunnel passwords from fault zones or swelling soils as soft supports. HDC elements after reaching to compressive yield stress, in nonlinear behavior have hardening combined with increasing strain and compressive strength. The main aim of this laboratory and numerical research is to construct concrete elements with the above properties so the compressive stress-strain behavior of different concrete elements with four categories of mix designs have been discussed and finally one of them has been defined as HDC element mix design. Furthermore, two columns with and without implementing of HDC elements have been made and stress-strain curves of them have been investigated experimentally. An analysis model is presented for columns using finite element method adopted by ABAQUS. The results obtained from the ABAQUS finite element method are compared with experimental data. The main comparison is made for stress-strain curve. The stress-strain curves from the finite element method agree well with experimental results. The results show that the dimension of the HDC samples is significant in the stress-strain behavior. The use of the element greatly increases energy absorption and ductility.