New model for evaluating the impact response of steel fiber reinforced concrete subjected to the repeated drop-weight

The investigation of available experimental results obtained in the non-instrumented drop weight test recommended by American Concrete Institute on the steel-fiber-reinforced concrete reveals that the data distribution does not match a normal distribution. For this reason, logarithmic scales of the first-crack (number of blows to cause the first visible crack) and failure strengths (number of blows to spread the cracks sufficiently) are adopted to increase the fitness of the normal curve to the frequency histogram. The authors propose a novel model to predict the failure strength and evaluate the steel fiber effect on the post-cracking behavior of steel-fiber-reinforced concrete. The new model improves the prediction of the experimental results obtained in literature review for the various ranges of volume fraction of steel fiber analyzed. The proposed model is compared with other models using statistical parameters and the comparison shows a significant improvement considering different failure states. To verify the performance of the proposed model, in addition to results from another research, an experimental impact test was conducted. Besides, a reliable regression model is developed to validate experimental results. The findings underscore the potential of the proposed model to significantly enhance predictive accuracy, thereby proposing valuable insights for optimizing steel-fiber-reinforced concrete. • Using drop weight test to assess impact response of steel fiber reinforced concrete. • Proposing logarithmic-scale models to predict the failure strength of concrete. • Executing an experimental study to validate the accuracy of the proposed models.