BACK ANALYSIS OF TENSION-SOFTENING RELATIONSHIP OF CONCRETE

Abstract

It is known that bridging is a dominant mechanism in the fracture of concrete. The material property related to bridging is the tension-softening relationship which is the relationship between the transmitted tensile stress across the crack surface and the crack opening displacement. In this paper, a method to indirectly obtain the tension-softening curve from the bending test of a notched beam is proposed. The method is applied to reported results, and agreement is observed between the tension-softening curves by the proposed method and the modified J-integral-based technique. The method is also applied to bending tests of SFRC beams, and results are compared with those of direct tension tests.