Evaluation of several multiaxial failure criteria for concrete after freeze-thaw (F-T) cycles

•Several multiaxial failure criteria are evaluated to predict multiaxial strength of concrete after freeze-thaw cycles.•A higher-order Liu-Yang criterion is proposed to predict tensile failure mode of concrete after freeze-thaw cycles.•Two failure criteria are recommended to predict multiaxial strength of concrete after freeze-thaw cycles.

Multiaxial test data of four types of concrete after F-T cycles are used to evaluate the Willam-Warnke, He-Song, Songs, Hsieh-Ting-Chen and Liu-Yang criteria regarding their ability to predict multiaxial strength of these concrete. The evaluation indicates that the Willam-Warnke criterion gives accurate prediction of multiaxial strength of these concrete, while the He-Song and Songs criteria with the same tensile and compressive meridians as Willam-Warnke criterion predict considerable deviation from experimental results, and the Hsieh-Ting-Chen criterion gives improper prediction of multiaxial strength of these concrete. It is found that the Liu-Yang criterion under-predicts multiaxial strength of normal concrete (NC), three-graded aggregate concrete (TGC) and wet-screened concrete (WSC) with tensile failure mode, and then a higher-order Liu-Yang criterion is proposed to fix this problem and gives a better prediction. Therefore, the Willam-Warnke and higher-order Liu-Yang criteria are recommended to predict multiaxial strength of these concrete after F-T cycles.