Damage Morphology for Advanced Concretes

The development and implementation of new damage morphology models for concrete materials is critical to understanding their dynamic behavior during severe shock loading environments. Current constitutive models of conventional strength concretes do not accurately represent the behavioral characteristics of new ultra-high strength concretes because of differences in damage mechanisms during failure. Specifically, experimental data suggests that the fracture behavior of the ultra-high strength materials do not behave the same under failure loadings. The objective of this research is to conduct quasi-static and dynamic testing on concrete materials, beyond peak load, and utilize a relatively new X-ray computed tomography technique to non-destructively map the damage morphology of the materials and relate quantitatively the observed damage to constitutive models that can better predict dynamic loading events such as penetration with steel projectiles. In Phase I, we developed and validated damage morphology testing techniques through limited experiments on ultra high-strength concrete samples in dynamic compression experiments. During the Phase II effort, testing will be completed on a conventional and ultra-high-strength concrete samples, damage phenomenologies will be studied, and computational concrete models will be modified and validated for these new concrete materials.