Multiple cracking and strain-hardening criteria of Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) with river sand
Yazhao Li, Junxia Li, En‐Hua Yang, Xinchun Guan
Abstract
The inclusion of river sand in ECC alters the crack initiation and propagation behavior. As a result, the multiple cracking and pseudo strain-hardening of the river sand ECC (RS-ECC) are different from that of the typical micro-silica sand ECC. This study investigates the strain-hardening criteria for the RS-ECC by considering the matrix as a three-phase material containing pre-existing flaws along the sand/matrix interface with a given size distribution. Micromechanics is used to impart the new mechanisms in the analytic model for the steady-state crack analysis and the formulation of the strain-hardening criteria of ECC incorporating river sand. A probability-based approach is adopted to assess the strain-hardening potential of RS-ECC and validated with experimental results. Results show that the proposed model can predict the tensile properties of RS-ECC, which can be used to guide ingredients selection and components tailoring of RS-ECC to achieve required tensile strain-hardening performance.