Experimental investigation on the mechanical behavior of foamed concrete under uniaxial and triaxial loading

Abstract A series of uniaxial and triaxial experiments are performed to analyze the mechanical behavior of foamed concrete (FC). The experimental results indicate that for uniaxial loading, foamed concrete demonstrates brittle failure under a uniaxial tension and small compression deformation. A 1D damage constitutive model is then established and expected to predict the nonlinear responses of foamed concrete under a large compression deformation. For triaxial loading, the level of confining pressure significantly influences the multiaxial mechanical behavior of foamed concrete due to its hydrostatically compressible characteristic. An elliptic phenomenological yield criterion based on three loading paths is further proposed and extended to consider the density-dependent effect by modifying the corresponding material constants as a function of material density. The comparisons between the theoretical predictions and experimental results reveal that the present yield criterion can give a good description of the tension/compression asymmetry, pressure dependence, and density sensitivity of the yield loci under the effective stress-mean stress space.