Experimental Study and Extended Finite Element Simulation of Fracture of Self-Compacting Rubberized Concrete

Self-compacting rubberized concrete (SCRC) is a high-performance concrete that can achieve compacting effect by self-gravity without vibration during pouring. Because of its excellent fluidity, homogeneity, and stability, the application of self-compacting concrete in engineering can improve work efficiency and reduce project cost. The effects of loading rate on the fracture behavior of self-compacting concrete were studied in this paper. Three-point bend (TPB) tests were carried out at five loading rates of 1, 0.1, 0.001, 0.0001, and 0.00001 mm/s. The dimensions of the specimens were 100 mm × 100 mm × 400 mm. A precast crack was set in the middle of the specimen with a notch-depth ratio of 0.4. The experimental results show that the peak load on the load-CMOD (crack mouth opening displacement) curve gradually increases with the increase of the loading rate. Although the fracture energy a presented greater dispersion under the loading rate of 1 mm/s, the overall changes were still rising with the increase of the loading rate. Besides studying the softening characteristics of the self-compacting concrete, the constitutive softening curve of the self-compacting concrete was obtained using the bilinear model. Finally, curved three-point bending beams were simulated by using the extended finite element method based on ABAQUS. The fracture process of the self-compacting concrete under different loading conditions was analyzed more intuitively. The simulation results were compared with the experimental results, and the same conclusions were obtained.

This creative work has been published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license which allows copying, and redistribution as well as adaptation of the original work provided appropriate credit is given to the original author and the conditions of the license are met.