Failure Envelope for Steel‐Fiber Concrete under Biaxial Compression

Abstract

Steel‐fiber concrete (SFC) demonstrates better deformational and cracking characteristics as compared to plain concrete and is used in structures where significant tensile stresses are encountered. Also, recent experimental studies have indicated that an improvement in the biaxial compressive strength of plain concrete can be achieved by the addition of steel fibers. In this paper, an attempt is made to obtain analytically the failure envelope for the steel‐fiber concrete under biaxial compression. In this approach, the biaxial compressive behavior of steel‐fiber concrete is modeled as that of ordinary concrete under triaxial compression, with the stress in the third direction taken equal to the confining pressure due to fibers. Thus the failure envelopes are obtained by using the material laws for fiber concrete and a suitable model for the plain concrete under triaxial compression. The predictions of the analytical model are found to compare well with the available experimental results.