Application of Base Force Element Method to Mesomechanics Analysis for Recycled Aggregate Concrete

Abstract

The base force element method (BFEM) on potential energy principle is used to analyze recycled aggregate concrete (RAC) on mesolevel. The model of BFEM with triangular element is derived. The recycled aggregate concrete is taken as five-phase composites consisting of natural coarse aggregate, new mortar, new interfacial transition zone (ITZ), old mortar, and old ITZ on meso-level. The random aggregate model is used to simulate the mesostructure of recycled aggregate concrete. The mechanics properties of uniaxial compression and tension tests for RAC are simulated using the BFEM, respectively. The simulation results agree with the test results. This research method is a new way for investigating fracture mechanism and numerical simulation of mechanics properties for recycled aggregate concrete.

Mesoscopic Numerical Simulation of Fracture Process and Failure Mechanism of Concrete Based on Convex Aggregate Model

“…e base force element method was extended on the previous work of [39] to model the damage process of the convex aggregate concrete by using the programming language FORTRAN in the numerical simulations.…”

“…e concrete material containing convex aggregate is considered to have three-phase media, as shown in Figure 2. Compared with the work of [39], the effect of aggregate type is explored.…”

“…Moreover, the programming is simple, and the calculation accuracy is high. Furthermore, the base force element method (BFEM) on potential energy principle was used to analyze recycled aggregate concrete on mesoscale [39].…”

Application of Base Force Element Method on Complementary Energy Principle to Rock Mechanics Problems

“…In the paper [41], the concave polygonal element model of BFEM on complementary energy principle was proposed for the concave polygonal mesh problems. In the paper [42], the BFEM on potential energy principle was used to analyze recycled aggregate concrete (RAC) on mesolevel, in which the model of BFEM with triangular element was derived, and the simulation results of the BFEM agree with the test results of recycled aggregate concrete. In recently, the BFEM on damage mechanics has been used to analyze the compressive strength, the size effects of compressive strength, and fracture process of concrete at mesolevel, and the analysis method is the new way for investigating fracture mechanism and numerical simulation of mechanical properties for concrete.…”

“…However, the conventional finite element method (FEM) based on the displacement model has some shortcomings, such as large deformation, treatment of incompressible materials, bending of thin plates, and moving boundary problems. In the past decades, numerous efforts techniques have been proposed for developing finite element models which are robust and insensitive to mesh distortion, such as the hybrid stress method [1][2][3][4], the equilibrium models [5,6], the mixed approach [7], the integrated force method [8][9][10][11], the incompatible displacement modes [12,13], the assumed strain method [14][15][16][17], the enhanced strain modes [18,19], the selectively reduced integration scheme [20], the quasiconforming element method [21], the generalized conforming method [22], the Alpha finite element method [23], the new spline finite element method [24,25], the unsymmetric method [26][27][28][29], the new natural coordinate methods [30][31][32][33], the smoothed finite element method [34], and the base force element method [35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42]…”