Numerical investigation to determine the development of tensile strength in the early age of concrete using experimental data from anchor pull-out tests

This study investigates the tensile behavior of anchor pull-out tests from super early age concrete(less than 12h) by finite element(FE) software ANSYS Workbench. In previous experiment, several series of pull-out tests were finished and analyzed. In each per hour, different speeds(1mm/s, 0.2mm/s, 0.1mm/s and 0.833mm/s) were evaluated, getting the results about correlation of pull-out force and displacement(F-D curve). It is difficult to evaluate the specific development of tensile strength in super young concrete, due to the super plasticity that makes itself soft and unstable. The first step of this study is to collect relevant empirical formula, theoretical varying material properties with time and pull-out force of experimental applied anchors. Comparison of simulation analysis results and empirical formulas determines whether the establishment of the finite element model and adapted constitutive model of known natural hardened concrete(NHC) are valid or not. The second procedure is that the material properties of NHC are replaced by different age values and modified until getting the same simulation results as experiment outcome. The propose of this paper is to investigate a more accurate modified formula to describe the development of tensile behavior in super early age concrete:1. Introduction 2. Background 2.1 Modes of failure 2.2 A new failure mode 2.3 Finite Element Numerical Simulation 3. Research Questions 4. Aims/Objectives of the Research 5. Proposed Research Method 5.1 Previous Empirical theory 5.1.1 Cubic Compressive strength of Early Age Concrete 5.1.2 Tensile Strength of Early Age Concrete 5.1.3 Modulus of Elasticity in Early Age Concrete 5.1.4 Prediction of pull-out maximum force to headed studs from concrete 5.2 Pervious Experiment 5.3 Numerical Simulation 6. Significance/Contribution to the Discipline 7. Experiment Program 7.1 Experiment Setup 7.2 Experiment Result 8. Numerical simulation and analysis 8.1 Material Properties 8.2 Modelling Setup 8.3 The first pull-out test 8.4 Comparison Results at different stages 9. Discussion and Results 10. Summary and Conclusion 11. Recommendation for future studies 12. References 13. Appendi