Fracture process of rubberized concrete by fictitious crack model and AE monitoring

According to the results of three-point bending tests of rubberized concrete and plain concrete, the parameters such as total fracture energy (GF), initial fracture energy (Gf), and tensile strength (ft) are obtained for concrete material. Using ABAQUS software and a bilinear softening fictitious crack model, the crack propagation process was simulated and compared to the experimental results. It is found that the increase of AE hit count has a similar trend with the increase of energy dissipation in FEM simulation. For two types of concretes, both experimental results and numerical simulation indicate that the rubberized concrete has a better fracture resistance.