Damage Prediction for Concrete With and Without Fibre Reinforcement

Although concrete structures are subject to large numbers of load applications during the design lives, often involving stress reversals, and concrete is known to deteriorate both in strength and stiffness under such repeated load applications, relatively little is known about its fatigue behavior, especially about the damage accumulation in the low-cycle fatigue range. It is proposed to perform a comprehensive experimental test program to fill this gap in knowledge, by measuring the energy dissipation capacity of concrete with and without fibre reinforcement under uni-and biaxial stress cycles. The results of this experimental study will constitute a data base that will permit the development of damage prediction tools and low-cycle fatigue analysis of concrete members subjected to arbitrary load histories. The proposed research contains also an analytical component with the objective of developing a theory to simulate damage accumulation in concrete and to predict the fatigue life for variable-amplitude load histories. As the Palmgren-Miner hypothesis of linear damage accumulation is known to apply neither to metal structures nor to concrete, the experimental data to be obtained shall serve as a basis to construct a more accurate damage prediction model with which the remaining life of concrete material can be determined.