Micromechanical Modeling of Flexural Strength for Epoxy Polymer Concrete

Abstract

Epoxy polymer concrete (EPC) has been widely used in civil engineering nowadays due to its excellent mechanical properties and advantages in processing. In this paper, a modeling study has been carried out on the flexural performance of EPC. Two classic micromechanics models, i.e. rule of mixture and Mori-Tanaka method, are introduced to predict the flexural strength of EPC with various epoxy resin contents. The comparison shows that the parallel model based on the rule of mixture attains a good agreement with the measured results when the epoxy resin content is sufficiently high to achieve strong adhesion between the aggregate and the epoxy resin. In contrast, the Mori–Tanaka method with the failure criterion dominated by the weakest phase fails to give acceptable prediction due to the unsuitability of its basic assumptions to EPC, particularly when the epoxy resin content is at relatively high levels.