Fracture process of rubberized concrete by fictitious crack model and AE monitoring

According to the results of three-point bending tests of rubberized concrete and plain concrete, the parameters such as total fracture energy ( GF ), initial fracture energy ( Gf ), and tensile strength ( fₜ ) are obtained for concrete material. Using ABAQUS software and a bilinear softening fictitious crack model, the crack propagation process was simulated and compared to the experimental results. It is found that the increase of AE hit count has a similar trend with the increase of energy dissipation in FEM simulation. For two types of concretes, both experimental results and numerical simulation indicate that the rubberized concrete has a better fracture resistance.