Flow of fresh concrete through steel bars: A porous medium analogy

Although being a very promising area of concrete technology, computational modeling of fresh concrete flow is a comprehensive and time consuming task. The complexity and required computation time are additionally increased when simulating casting of heavily reinforced sections, where each single reinforcement bar has to be modeled. In order to improve the computation speed and to get closer to a practical tool for simulation of casting processes, an innovative approach to model reinforced sections is proposed here. The basic idea of this approach is to treat the reinforcement zone as a porous medium in which a concrete is propagating. In the present paper, the numerical implementation of this concept is described. A methodology allowing for the computation of the equivalent permeability of the steel bars network is suggested. Finally, this numerical technique efficiency is evaluated by a comparison with experimental results of model fluids casting in model formworks.