A constitutive law which incorporates creep and fracture behavior for the analysis of time- dependent cracking of concrete structures is briefly presented. The constitutive model is composed of two parts acting in series: a Maxwell chain for the creep of…
A constitutive law which incorporates creep and fracture behavior for the analysis of time- dependent cracking of concrete structures is briefly presented. The constitutive model is composed of two parts acting in series: a Maxwell chain for the creep of uncracked concrete and a recent version of the mi- croplane model (M4), which includes the rate-dependence of fracturing associated with the activation energy of bond ruptures, for the cracking. The proposed formulation is applied to the simulation of the size effect of single notched specimens in direct tension for quasi-static fracture in the time domain with different loading rates. The numerical results reveal clearly the link between the size of the fracture process zone (FPZ) and the rate loading.