Discrete fracture in high performance fibre reinforced concrete materials

In this paper a simple, but effective methodology to simulate opening mode fracture in high performance fibre reinforced concrete is presented. The main contribution of the paper is a technique to extrapolate the load displacement curves of three point bending experiments on fibre reinforced concrete. The extrapolation allows the full work of fracture to be determined, from which the fracture energy may be obtained. The fracture energy is used in the definition of a cohesive softening function with crack tip singularity. The softening relation is implemented in an embedded discontinuity method, which is employed for the numerical simulation of three point bending experiments. The experimental work includes a size effect study on three point bending specimens. The numerical simulation provides a satisfactory prediction of the flexural behaviour and the size effect observed in the experiments.