Numerical study on flexural behaviors of steel reinforced engineered cementitious composite (ECC) and ECC/concrete composite beams

Engineered cementitious composite (ECC) is a class of high performance cementitious composites with pseudo strain-hardening behavior and excellent crack control capacity. Substitution of concrete with ECC can largely reduce the cracking and durability problems associated with brittleness of concrete. In this paper, a simplified constitutive model of the ECC material was applied to simulate the flexural behaviors of the steel reinforced ECC and ECC/concrete composite beams with finite element method. The simulation results are found to be in good agreement with test results, indicating that the finite element model is reasonably accurate in simulating the flexural behaviors of the steel reinforced ECC flexural members. The effects of the ECC modulus, ECC tensile ductility, ECC thickness and ECC position on flexural behaviors in terms of ultimate moment, deflection and the maximum crack width of the steel reinforced ECC or ECC/concrete composite beam are hence evaluated. © 2014 Science China Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.