Development of an enhanced damage law for typical steel fiber reinforced concrete based on uniaxial compression and tension tests

Understanding the stiffness of a concrete structure is crucial to analyze it, particularly for statically indeterminate structures. Stiffness degradation – commonly referred to as damage – occurs with the onset of cracking or large compressive strains. For most conventional and specialized types of concrete, damage studies and models for predicting damage development are available. However, more information is needed about the damage behavior for the most common steel fiber reinforced concrete in Europe with strength class C30/37 and modern end-anchored high-strength fibers in dosages of 20–40 kg/m³. Therefore, in this study, these common steel fiber concretes were subjected to multiple load cycles in (1) uniaxial compression tests on cylinders and (2) direct tensile tests on bone specimens to investigate their damage behavior. The resulting damage was then compared to known damage laws, but none of the models predicted accurate damage results. Finally, an existing damage law for plain concrete was modified as a function of the residual flexural tensile strength—the relevant parameter for describing the performance of the steel fiber reinforced concrete. Hereby, we were able to decisively improve the agreement between experimental results and the theoretical prognosis by utilizing our modified damage law.