Experimental Study On Material Performance Of Engineered Cementitious Composite And Numerical Simulation Of Cantilever Bending Column

Concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world for its mostexcellent performances, but there are some defects of normal cementitious materials,for example, higher brittleness, lower tension strength, lower toughness and easier tocrack. Just because of these defects, constructions of concrete are often destroyed oreven cannot be used in many projects. Fibers are added into cementitious materials toovercome above disadvantages, to improve the tensile properties, flexural strength andshear strength, to enhance the toughness and impact resistance, to improve the crackresistance, permeability, abrasion and wear resistance. The adding of fibers canimprove the durability of concrete and the quality and service life of the buildings.Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC), as a new generation of HighPerformance Fiber Reinforced Cementitious Composites (HPFRCC), which exhibitedsignificant pseudo strain-hardening and multiple cracking characteristics underuniaxial tensile loading and flexual loading, the ultimate tensile strain capacity wasbetween3%to5%and crack widths remained smaller than100μm. ECC has a broadexperimental research and project applications for its high ductility and excellentdurability. A number of full-scale structural applications have already appeared inJapan, Europe and the United States, But in China, the research of the ECC is only justat the experimental stage. In this paper, Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) fiber is used to studythe mechanical properties of ECC based on the previous research results of ECC. Themajor contributions are summarized as follows:1. Through cubic specimens and prism specimens compressive strength test, itwas studied that the difference of compressive behavior between ECC specimens andmortar matrix ones and flexual strength of all prism specimens. The elastic modulusand Poisson’s ratio for ECC and mortar matrix specimens were also obtained.2. Through bending test for beams, it was studied that the flexural behavior ofECC beam specimens and the characteristics of pseudo strain-hardening and crackinitiation. Bending performance of ECC beams was evaluated and the flexuraltoughness index was also calculated according to the test results.3. Through the OpenSees finite element analysis software, it was studied that theeffcet of ductile deformation behavior of polyvinyl alcohol reiforced EngineeredCementitious Composites (PVA-ECC) on the response of steel reiforced flexural members under lateral load reversals. The difference of flexural behavior betweenR-ECC specimens and R-C specimens was investigated.