The upcoming need of concrete structures designed against impulsive and extreme load due to natural hazards, industrial accidents or terrorists attack requires analytical modeling capable of reproducing material behavior in this range of loading. When a concrete structure is submitted…
The upcoming need of concrete structures designed against impulsive and extreme load due to natural hazards, industrial accidents or terrorists attack requires analytical modeling capable of reproducing material behavior in this range of loading. When a concrete structure is submitted to an impact or an explosion loading, material may be submitted to high triaxial compression stresses as well as tensile stresses due to reflection of compressive waves on free surfaces. Furthermore, the water saturation degree in massive concrete structures may be nearly 100% at core whereas the material is dry on the skin. Thus, the impact response of a massive concrete wall may depend on the water saturation state in the material. This paper first presents some triaxial tests performed at a maximum confining pressure of 100 MPa on a concrete representative of a containment building of a nuclear power plant. Experimental results show the constitutive behavior and its dependence to the water saturation ratio of concrete specimens. The second part of this study aims at modeling these tests by means of the coupled PRM constitutive model. Although its robustness and effectiveness, this constitutive model did not allow to accurately reproduce the response of concrete specimens observed during the tests. The differences between experimental and numerical results can be explained by both the influence of the saturation state of concrete and the effect of deviatoric stresses which are not well taken into account into the PRM model. Some modifications of the PRM model were carried out; they allow improving the numerical prediction of concrete behavior under high triaxial stresses and various saturation states.