Flexural Behaviour of members with a combination of steel fibres and conventional reinforcement

Journal article, 2010

The purpose of the presented work was to investigate the flexural behaviour of members with a combination of steel fibres and conventional reinforcement. A systematic approach for material testing and structural analysis, based on fracture mechanics, was used and covers (1) material testing, (2) inverse analysis and (3) structural analysis based on FEM. In addition, the average crack spacing from the FE analyses was compared with experimental results and with two analytical approaches. The results suggest that the approach used for the material testing provides the properties necessary to perform analyses based on non-linear fracture mechanics. The structural behaviour could be predicted with good agreement with FEM using both bi-linear and multi-linear stress-crack opening (-w) relationships. When comparing peak loads obtained in the experiments with results from the analyses, the agreement was good. The crack spacing from the experiments was predicted with good agreement using both the analytical approach by Löfgren and the multi-linear FE approach.