Static and dynamic performance of a newly developed steel fibre-reinforced self-compacting concrete

Ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC), such as steel fibre-reinforced self-compacting concrete, is of high strength, high deformation and high toughness in comparison with conventional concrete, making it ideal material to resist blast loading. In this paper a series of static tests has been conducted to study the performance of newly developed steel fibre-reinforced self-compacting concrete specimens. The quasi-static compressive tests and direct tensile tests were conducted for determination of the compressive strength and direct tensile strength of the specimens with/without steel fibres and four point bending tests were conducted to obtain the flexural tensile strength of the steel fibre-reinforced self-compacting concrete specimens. The stress–strain relationships, the flexural tensile strength of steel fibre-reinforced self-compacting concrete tested were compared and discussed. Then a moment-rotation model developed based on the static testing was applied in this study and afterwards, this material model is incorporated into a numerically efficient one dimensional finite element model, utilizing Timoshenko Beam Theory, to determine the flexural response of steel fibre reinforced concrete slabs subjected to blasts and the model is then validated with the real blast testing results. The results show that the developed material model is able to predict the moment curvature relationship with reasonable accuracy and the advanced FEM based model can be used to simulate the dynamic response of ultra-high performance reinforced concrete (UHPRC) specimens against blasts efficiently