A damage plastic approach for modelling strain hardening cementitious composites

Zhou, Chao (2025) A damage plastic approach for modelling strain hardening cementitious composites. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.

Abstract

Strain hardening cementitious composites or engineered cementitious composites exhibit significantly larger strains at maximum tensile stress than ordinary fibre reinforced concrete. The performance of strain hardening cementitious composites relies on the fibre/matrix properties at the micro-scale. A micro-mechanics based constitutive model for fibre reinforced strain hardening cementitious composites for finite element simulations of structural components is required.

Steel reinforced strain hardening cementitious composites potentially could be used as a composite material of structural component to improve ductility and load capacity. However, the failure process of steel reinforced strain hardening cementitious composite is not well understood because of the complex interaction of two scales of reinforcement involving crack patterns with spacings at multiple scales.

In this research, it is aimed to establish the link of micro-mechanics to structural component by incorporating a micro-mechanics based fibre bridging stress crack opening law into a macroscopic damage-plasticity approach, which is called CDPM2F. The model is implemented in the open-source finite element program OOFEM. The model produces mesh-insensitive results and its response agrees well with experimental results for failure in tension, shear and compression reported in the literature.

The response of specimens made of cementitious composites with a single reinforcement bar embedded in its centre is also investigated. The modelling reproduces well the experimental results which shows that the use of strain hardening matrix can lead to reduced overall ductility. By means of post-processing of the results, it is shown that this reduction of ductility is strongly dependent on the interplay between the ultimate matrix stress and ultimate steel stress.

• Item Type: Thesis (PhD)
• Qualification Level: Doctoral
• Subjects: T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General)
• Colleges/Schools: College of Science and Engineering > School of Engineering
• Supervisor's Name: Grassl, Dr. Peter
• Date of Award: 2025
• Depositing User: Theses Team
• Unique ID: glathesis:2025-84959
• Copyright: Copyright of this thesis is held by the author.
• Date Deposited: 25 Mar 2025 15:20
• Last Modified: 25 Mar 2025 15:20
• Thesis DOI: 10.5525/gla.thesis.84959
• URI: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/id/eprint/84959

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