About the dynamic uniaxial tensile strength of concrete-like materials

Experimental methods for determining the tensile strength of concrete-like materials over a wide range of strain-rates from 10−4 to 102 s−1 are examined in this paper. Experimental data based on these techniques show that the tensile strength increases apparently with strain-rate when the strain-rate is above a critical value of around 100–101 s−1. However, it is still not clear that whether the tensile strength enhancement of concrete-like materials with strain-rate is genuine (i.e. it can be attributed to only the strain-rate effect) or it involves “structural” effects such as inertia and stress triaxility effects. To clarify this argumentation, numerical analyses of direct dynamic tensile tests, dynamic splitting tests and spalling tests are performed by employing a hydrostatic-stress-dependent macroscopic model (K&C concrete model) without considering strain-rate effect. It is found that the predicted results from these three types of dynamic tensile tests do not show any strain-rate dependency, which indicates that the strain-rate enhancement of the tensile strength observed in dynamic tensile tests is a genuine material effect. A micro-mechanism model is developed to demonstrate that microcrack inertia is one of the mechanisms responsible for the increase of dynamic tensile strength with strain-rate observed in the dynamic tensile tests on concrete-like materials.