Behavioral Simulation Model for SFRC and Application to Flexural Fatigue in Tension

A fatigue behavioral simulation for steel fiber reinforced concrete (SFRC) subjected to high cycle repetition of loads is presented. The fatigue constitutive models for normal strength concrete developed in the past decades are extended to those for SFRC with regard to tension, compression and shear transfer along dispersed cracking. The hysteretic path-dependency of SFRC is extensively focused on as well as post-cracking tension softening, because it greatly affects the stress-strain amplitudes of SFRC inside structures. The interaction of multi-directional cracks is taken into account based upon the fixed crack approach for enabling the damage evolution under the principal stress rotation. The rate effect on the stress and strain relation is also formulated to take into account the nonlinearity related to both loading rates and numbers of cycles. These proposed models for SFRC are experimentally verified in view of S-N diagrams of flexural tension for practical use.