Modelling the post-cracking behaviour of steel fibre reinforced concrete for structural design purposes

With the increasing number of applications in practice, the demand for standardised test methods and design rules for Steel Fibre Reinforced Concrete (SFRC) arises. Test methods need to be practical, which means that they have to be relatively cheap and simple to carry out. Design models should be easy to use and reliable. This paper presents a procedure to develop a post-cracking material relation for SFRC by means of inverse analysis. It shows that mean experimental results from three-point bending tests can be simulated with high accuracy using a bilinear stress-crack width relation. After determining the correct procedure to calculate the characteristic values, material safety factors are proposed dependent on the scatter in the post-cracking behaviour. Finally, a material relation is proposed that can be used for structural design purposes