Blending a certain proportion of basalt fiber into concrete improves the toughness of concrete, which prevents cracking and avoids the brittle behaviors. In this paper, the compressive, tensile, and flexural tests of concrete with different basalt fiber contents were carried out. Then the test phenomena, failure modes, and mechanical properties were compared and analyzed to derive the relationship between the basalt fiber contents and mechanical properties. The toughness and crack resistance performance of basalt fiber reinforced concrete were evaluated by the fracture energy, advanced toughness parameters, and characteristic length proposed by Hillerborg. The correlation coefficient of basalt fiber was introduced to establish the calculation formula for mechanical properties of basalt fiber reinforced concrete. The results indicated that basalt fiber significantly improved the toughness and crack resistance performance of concrete. The enhancing effect of the basalt fiber on the compressive strength of concrete is lower than that of tensile strength and flexural strength. Moreover, the improvement effect was the highest with the basalt fiber content was 0.3% and 0.4%.
The creasing and folding behavior of three paperboards have been studied both experimentally and numerically. Creasing and folding studies were performed on strips in both the machine direction and the cross machine direction. A finite element model that mimicked the experimental creasing and folding setup was developed, and the creasing and folding behavior could be well predicted for all three paperboards. An experimental characterization scheme consisting of three experiments was proposed, and was shown to be sufficient to predict the creasing and folding behavior. For the whole paperboard the shear strength profiles in the through thickness direction was determined with the notched shear test. Each ply was laid free by grinding, and density measurements and in-plane tension tests were performed on the bottom, middle and top plies of each paperboard. Instead of assuming uniform properties in each ply, the shear strength profiles were used to map the measured properties in the through thickness direction. Numerical simulations were performed when the ply and interface properties of the paperboards were altered to follow different shear strength profiles. This was done in order to mimic different production strategies. It was shown that the interface strengths mainly influenced the folding behavior. Whereas altered the ply properties affected the creasing force needed.
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