Micromechanics of the Deformation and Damage of Steel Fiber-reinforced Concrete

A. Ouaar (1) , I. Doghri (1) , L. Delannay (1) , J.-F. Thimus (2)

1 CESAME - Centre for systems engineering and applied mechanics [Louvain]
2 Département AUCE

This article presents a study of steel fiber-reinforced concrete (SFRC). In its first part, a four-point bending test performed on both plain concrete and SFRC is investigated. The collected nonlinear load—deflection curves are transformed into stress—strain curves with the help of an incremental method, which the authors developed in the nonlinear regime. In the second part of this article, the authors present a micromechanical approach based on Mori—Tanaka/ Voigt mean-field homogenization schemes in order to model the effective nonlinear behavior of the three-phase brittle composite materials. The first phase (concrete matrix) is assumed to obey Ju's brittle damage model. The second phase (fibers) is modeled with classical J plasticity, while the third phase represents cavities. Numerical algorithms enable the simulation of SFRC within reasonable CPU time and memory requirements. The homogenization module is interfaced to the finite element package ABAQUS. A two-scale simulation of the bending test is validated against the experimental results.

Mots clés: steel fiber-reinforced concrete; micromechanics; homogenization; damage; experiments; steel fiber-reinforced concrete.

A. Ouaar, I. Doghri, L. Delannay, J.-F. Thimus. Micromechanics of the Deformation and Damage of Steel Fiber-reinforced Concrete. International Journal of Damage Mechanics, 2007, 16 (2), pp.227-260. ⟨10.1177/1056789506064946⟩. ⟨hal-00571158⟩