Surrogated modelling for structural reliability and safety assessments of high-strength concrete beams with industrial and recycled steel fibers

Abstract

As a secondary material recycled from tyres, Recycled Steel Fibre Reinforced Concrete (RSF) aims to replace industrial steel fibres (ISF) to improve concrete matrix‘s severability, fracture toughness, and residual tensile stress. Despite the increasing attention on the mechanical properties of this material, RSF concrete’s influence on structural component strength is still neglected due to a lack of sufficient and reliable experimental data. This study looks into existing Crack mouth opening displacement (CMOD) experiment results of both types of steel fibre reinforced concrete beams together with nonlinear finite element model (FEM) simulations using the RILEM TC 162-TDF crack damage model(CDP) proposed for ISF in ABAQUS. Meanwhile, an additional parameter analysis of the experimental data related to shear capacity also examines the shear span ratio, fibre content, and fibre type of the two types of fibre reinforced concrete beams. Moreover, Kriging surrogate models (KSM) and Sobol global sensitivity analysis have been conducted. For the reference concrete beams with a fibre content of 0.4 %, the prediction accuracy ratios of ultimate strength, corresponding displacement, and stiffness between the FEM and the experiment results are 98 %, 88 %, and 100 %, respectively. This paper has been proved that the CMOD-based CDP model effectively elucidates the shear contribution of different steel fibres, which can be used in structural analysis of ISF or RSF concrete for structure components. Utilizing FEMs, a series of modified flexural strength prediction formulas based on TR63 standards are proposed to enhance structural applications with ISF and RSF. Moreover, the prediction ability of the proposed formulas is validated using the results of 183 real flexural capacity experiments of ISF reinforced concrete beams, achieving an improved R² value of 0.97.