Abstract
A user-defined bonded-particle model (UBM) which is based on the modified parallel bond was established in this paper to investigate the tensile and compressive failure mechanism of concrete on the three-dimensional (3D) level. The contact constitutive relation and the failure criterion of the UBM can be added to the commercial discrete element software PFC^{3D} by compiling them as a dynamic link library file and loading it into PFC^{3D} whenever needed. In addition, the aggregate particles can be generated according to the volume fraction and the shape of each aggregate is irregular. Then, by comparing the results of numerical simulation with the results of laboratory tests, it is found that this bonded-particle model can simulate the tensile and compressive failure process of concrete well to a certain extent. Specifically, the two have basically similar failure patterns and stress–strain responses no matter under tension or compression loading condition. All results indicate that this UBM is a promising tool in understanding and predicting the tensile and compressive failure process of concrete.
Highlights
Concrete has been widely used as an extremely important building material for more than one century
The mechanical behaviors of concrete at macrolevel are strongly affected by its mesoscopic structures (Nitka and Tejchman 2015), those simplifications of concrete are unreasonable from this perspective
Hentz et al (2004) developed a 3D discrete element model to study the dynamic behavior of concrete at high strain rates and Nagai et al (2005) successfully put forward a 3D rigid body-spring model (RBSM) to predict the failure behavior of concrete
Summary
Concrete has been widely used as an extremely important building material for more than one century During this period, a large number of scholars have made lots of in-depth research on its mechanical properties and failure mechanism. Nitka and Tejchman (2015) have attempted to reproduce the mechanical behaviors of concrete by using a 3D discrete element model YADE which was first developed in University of Grenoble. It is worth mentioning that this new model is able to unify the two loading conditions, namely tension and compression. In other words, it can simulate the mechanical behaviors of concrete well to a certain extent in two cases (tension and compression) by using the same UBM and the same set of model parameters.
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