FEM investigation of SFRCs using a substepping integration of constitutive equations

Nowadays, steel fiber reinforced concretes (SFRCs) are widely used in practical applications. Significant experimental research has thus been carried out to determine the constitutive equations that represent the behavior of SFRCs under multiaxial loadings. However, numerical modelling of SFRCs via FEM has been challenging due to the complexities of the implementation of these constitutive equations. In this study, following the literature, a plasticity model is constructed for the behavior of SFRCs that involves the Willam-Warnke failure surface with the relevant evolution laws and a non-associated flow rule for determining the plastic deformations. For the precise (yet rapid) integration of the constitutive equations, an explicit substepping scheme consisting of yield intersection and drift correction algorithms is employed and thus implemented in ABAQUS via UMAT. The FEM model includes various material parameters that are determined from the experimental data. Three sets of parameters are used in the numerical simulations. While the first set is from the experiments that are conducted in this study on SFRC specimens with various contents of steel fibers, the other two sets are from the experiments reported in the literature. The response of SFRCs under multiaxial compression obtained from various numerical simulations are compared with the experimental data. The good agreement between numerical results and the experimental data indicates that not only the adopted plasticity model represents the behavior of SFRCs very well but also the implemented integration scheme can be employed in practical applications of SFRCs.