Experimental and numerical fracture analysis of the plain and polyvinyl alcohol fiber-reinforced ultra-high-performance concrete structures

In this paper, a new procedure for manufacturing the plain and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) fiber-reinforced ultrahigh-performance concrete (UHPC) is introduced to improve its workability and to reduce its shrinkage behavior. To determine its fracture characteristics, a series of three-point bending tests are performed with the notched beam structures made of the produced UHPCs. In addition, with the rising demand for time and cost saving design methodologies associated with R&D experimentation for many industrial materials, such as UHPC structures, numerical modelling and simulation have become an essential tool. Therefore, a relevant discrete-level numerical modelling approach based on bond-based peridynamics is proposed to predict the fracture behaviors of the UHPC and UHPC-PVA structures. In the proposed method, the structures are discretized by uniform meshless nodes linked by standard peridynamic bonds, and then the bonds are randomly associated with mechanical and fracture parameters of the UHPC and PVA materials according to their corresponding volume fractions. With this approach, the reinforcement of the PVA fibers on the UHPC materials is expressed by the bonds with the parameters of PVA materials, which greatly simplifies the modelling process of randomly distributed PVA fibers reinforced UHPC structures. The comparison between numerical and experimental results validates the effectiveness and accuracy of the present method.