Plastic-damage model of lightweight concrete and normal weight concrete

Abstract

Commercial demand for lightweight concrete (LWC) has increased tremendously in recent years because of its inherent advantages over conventional concrete in a variety of structural applications. There is still, however, relatively little knowledge about the constitutive modeling of LWC. Existing concrete constitutive models have been proposed for normal weight concrete (NWC), but some of them contain too many parameters which cannot be obtained by conventional tests easily. Consequently, the constitutive modeling investigation is still a topic of great interest, even for NWC. In this study, a plastic-damage constitutive model for LWC as well as NWC is proposed and its numerical algorithm is developed and successfully implemented. In addition, experimental investigation is carried out to obtain the necessary material parameters and to verify the applicability of the proposed model.

The new plastic-damage constitutive model applicable to LWC and NWC is based on both continuum da