An elastoplastic damage constitutive model for hybrid steel-polypropylene fiber reinforced concrete

Abstract

An appropriate constitutive model to characterize the mechanical behavior of fiber reinforced concrete (FRC) plays a critical role in accurate prediction of structural performance. In this study, an elastoplastic damage constitutive model is developed for hybrid steel-polypropylene fiber reinforced concrete (HFRC), which can predict the versatile mechanical responses of HFRC as a result of various hybrid fiber inclusions. For plasticity growth, the Willam-Warnke five-parameter failure envelope is modified in the effective stress space to govern the yield condition of HFRC, while a nonlinear Drucker-Prager type plastic potential function is proposed to control the non-associated plastic flow. Regarding the damage evolution, the damage criterion and evolution laws are established in the Cauchy stress space, in which the plastic hardening and unilateral behaviors are taken into consideration. Upon two parallel integration algorithms to describe the development of plasticity and damage, as well as the identification of fiber-dependent parameters, the proposed model is numerically implemented and then validated by the experimental results from available research. The comparisons between the numerical predictions and the test results at both material scale and structural scale solidly demonstrate the capacity of the model in capturing the main features of HFRC when subjected to different loading paths.