Phases of fracture process zone and tension softening properties of concrete

The safety and serviceability of concrete structures are influenced very much by the cracking behavior of concrete. Since comprehensive numerical analysis techniques have been extensively developed to predict the mechanical behavior of concrete structures in the limit state, it is essential to study the constitutive laws to describe the cracking behavior of concrete in detail. The tension softening behavior of concrete is highly dominated by the existence of a fracture process zone (FPZ) ahead of a crack tip. Since the direct observation of the FPZ of concrete is hardly possible, the indirect techniques are applied, but it is still ambiguous what happens in the FPZ and how it affects the tension softening property. The purpose of this study is to present the property of the FPZ focusing on the influence of material structures by means of three-dimensional acoustic emission. These results are correlated to tension softening behavior evaluated by a numerical analysis to discuss how the tension softening property is related to the characteristics of the FPZ. The test procedure and the results are reported. (K.I.)