Post-cracking tensile behaviour of steel-fibre-reinforced roller-compacted-concrete for FE modelling and design purposes.

Fracture of steel-fibre-reinforced-concrete occurs mostly in the form of a smeared crack band undergoing progressive microcracking. For FE modelling and design purposes, this crack band could be characterised by a stress-strain (σ-e) relationship. For industrially-produced steel fibres, existing methodologies such as RILEM TC 162-TDF (2003) propose empirical equations to predict a trilinear σ-e relationship directly from bending test results. This paper evaluates the accuracy of these methodologies and their applicability for roller-compacted-concrete and concrete incorporating steel fibres recycled from post-consumer tyres. It is shown that the energy absorption capacity is generally overestimated by these methodologies, sometimes up to 60%, for both conventional and roller-compacted concrete. Tensile behaviour of fibre-reinforced-concrete is estimated in this paper by inverse analysis of bending test results, examining a variety of concrete mixes and steel fibres. A multilinear relationship is proposed which largely eliminates the overestimation problem and can lead to safer designs.