Identification of local phenomena of plasticity in concrete under compression test

AbstractIn this paper are specifically derived parameters useful to estimate the fatigue behaviour of concrete subject to uniaxial compression. For this, methodologies and experience already adopted in the study of fatigue steel and composite materials are used. These parameters are obtained by detecting the surface temperature of the specimen in the traditional static compression tests. In this way, the beginning of the crisis of the concrete for fatigue stress is linked to the loss of linearity of the temperature-test time curve (ΔT- t) and correlated to stress-test time curve (σ- t) of the tested cubic concrete specimens. In fact, the thermal analysis performed on the cubic specimen surface extended to the whole test time, shows interesting data on the crack beginning and on the subsequent evolution that after a certain number of loading cycles could determine the complete material failure. The slope variation in the interpolating curve temperature-test time allows to identify the critical points of the start fracture. This suggests a methodology to apply to civil infrastructures to evaluate in-situ, during the approval phase or during the working, critical situations.In this paper we propose a method to estimate the value of the "stress limit" (fatigue limit) of concrete material by means of an easy static uniaxial compression test according to an energetic method already proposed by Risitano