Experimental and Numerical Characterization of Normal-Weight Concrete at the Mesoscale
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 34, Issue 7
Abstract
Modeling the postpeak behavior of brittle materials like concrete remains a challenge from the point of view of computational mechanics due to the strong nonlinearities arising in the material behavior during softening and the complexity of the yield criterion that may describe their deformation capacity under generic triaxial stress states. A numerical model for plain concrete in compression is formulated within the framework of the coupled elastoplastic damage theory. The aim is to simulate, via the finite-element (FE) method, the stress-strain behavior of concrete at the mesoscale, where local confinement effects generally characterize the cement paste under the action of the surrounding aggregates. The mechanical characterization of the components are accomplished through a specific experimental campaign. With the subsequent validation study, it is shown that a few calibration parameters give a good prediction of the material strength and deformation capacity encountered in real uniaxial compression tests.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The financial support from the Italian Ministry of Research under Project PRIN 2017: 2017HFPKZY, “Modeling of Constitutive Laws for Traditional and Innovative Building Materials,” is gratefully acknowledged. The authors would like to thank Prof. Gianmaria Concheri for his valuable comments in the field of solid modeling and UNILAB Industrial Laboratories srl for the tomographic analyses that were useful to the solid reconstruction of the model, and Prof. Maria Chiara Dalconi for her support in the X-ray powder diffraction analysis of the gray limestone.
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 34 • Issue 7 • July 2022
Copyright
© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jun 3, 2021
Accepted: Oct 29, 2021
Published online: Apr 20, 2022
Published in print: Jul 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Sep 20, 2022
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