Experimental and finite element analysis of creep behaviour of steel fibre reinforced high strength concrete beams

The present study is focused on experimental investigations and numerical analyses of compressive and tensile total creep at long-term of high-strength concrete (HSC) beams. Reinforced concrete (RC) beams with and without steel fibres were investigated for their long-term creep behaviour. These beams are under sustained uniformly distributed load (SUDL) in bending containing steel fibres (SF) with two aspect ratios (55 and 80) and two steel fibre dosages (0.5% and 1%). The objective of this work is to evaluate the influence of steel fibres, their dosage and their aspect ratio on compressive and tensile total creep. Experimental results show that the long-term total creep is influenced by the volume fractions of steel fibres. Moreover, steel fibres decrease the tensile total creep more than the compressive one. A non-linear finite element method (FEM) is performed to simulate the long-term total creep strain rate included thanks to the time hardening model called generalized Garofalo creep which is based on Bailey-Norton law called power law creep. It was found a good agreement between the experimental and numerical results.