The Effect of Volume Fraction of Steel Fiber on the Tensile Softening Behavior in Ultra High Performance Concrete

Abstract

This paper estimated the influence of volume of steel fiber on the tensile softening behavior in Ultra High Performance Concrete. Tensile softening curves were obtained from Three-Point Bending Test(TPBT) with notched beam. Inverse analysis method by Uchida et al. was introduced to obtain the tensile softening behaviors from the results of TPBT. We could find out that the increase of volume fraction of steel fiber makes the tensile strength higher but all of the curves converged on an asymptote with crack width. We proposed the equation of softening curve expressed by combination of plastic area and exponential descending area considering the volume fraction of steel fiber and ω0, which is corresponding to the maximum crack width of plastic area. We also carried out the crack propagation analysis using finite element method with smeared crack model and confirmed that the proposed equation had a good agreement with the experimental results.