Development and Calibration of a Phenomenological Material Model for Steel-Fiber-Reinforced High-Performance Concrete Based on Unit Cell Calculations.

A phenomenological material model has been developed to facilitate the efficient numerical analysis of fiber-reinforced high-performance concrete (HPC). The formulation integrates an elasto-plastic phase-field model for simulating fractures within the HPC matrix, along with a superimposed one-dimensional elasto-plasticity model that represents the behavior of the embedded fibers. The Drucker-Prager plasticity and one-dimensional von-Mises plasticity formulations are incorporated to describe the nonlinear material behavior of both the HPC matrix and the fibers, respectively. Specific steps are undertaken during the development and calibration of the phenomenological material model. In the initial step, an experimental and numerical analysis of the pullout test of steel fibers embedded in an HPC matrix is conducted. This process is used to calibrate the micro-mechanical model based on the elasto-plastic phase-field formulation for fracture. In the subsequent step, virtual experiments based on an ellipsoidal unit cell, also with the resolution of fibers (used as a representative volume element, RVE), are simulated to analyze the impact of fiber-matrix interactions and their physical properties on the effective material behavior of fiber-reinforced HPC. In the final step, macroscopic boundary value problems (BVPs) based on a cuboid are simulated on a single scale using the developed phenomenological material model. The resulting macroscopic stress-strain characteristics obtained from both types of simulations, namely simulations of virtual experiments and macroscopic BVPs, are compared. This comparison is utilized for the calibration of material parameters to obtain a regularized solution and to assess the effectiveness of the presented phenomenological material model.

Damage Evolution of Steel Fibre-Reinforced High-Performance Concrete in Low-Cycle Flexural Fatigue: Numerical Modeling and Experimental Validation.

This contribution aims to analyze the deterioration behaviour of steel fibre-reinforced high-performance concrete (HPC) in both experiments as well as numerical simulations. For this purpose, flexural tensile tests are carried out on beams with different fibre contents and suitable damage indicators are established to describe and calibrate the damage behaviour numerically using a phase-field model approach. In addition to conventional measurement methods, the tests are equipped with acoustic emission sensors in order to obtain a more precise picture of crack evolution by observing acoustic events. It is shown that, in addition to classical damage indicators, such as stiffness degradation and absorbed energy, various acoustic indicators, such as the acoustic energy of individual crack events, can also provide information about the damage progress. For the efficient numerical analysis of the overall material behaviour of fibre-reinforced HPC, a phenomenological material model is developed. The data obtained in the experiments are used to calibrate and validate the numerical model for the simulation of three-point bending beam tests. To verify the efficiency of the presented numerical model, the numerical results are compared with the experimental data, e.g., load-CMOD curves and the degradation of residual stiffness.