A physically motivated model for fatigue damage of concrete

Abstract

The fatigue problem of concrete is still a challenging topic in the researches and applications of concrete engineering. This paper aims to develop a fatigue damage evolution law based model for concrete motivated by the analysis of physical mechanism. In this model, the fatigue energy dissipation process at microscale is investigated with rate process theory. The concept of self-similarity is employed to bridge the scale gap between microscale cracking and mesoscale dissipative element. With the stochastic fracture model, the crack avalanches and macro-crack nucleation processes from mesoscale to macroscale are simulated to obtain the behaviors of macroscope damage evolution of concrete. In conjunction with continuum damage mechanics framework, the fatigue damage constitutive model for concrete is then proposed. Numerical simulations are carried out to verify the model, revealing that the proposed model accommodates well with physical mechanism of fatigue damage evolution of concrete whereby the fatigue life of concrete structures under different stress ranges can be predicted.