About the Numerical Non-Linear Modelling of Steel Fiber Reinforced Concrete Structures

This paper presents an overview concerning the modeling of steel fiber reinforced concrete (SFRC), concentrating on numerical modeling and a two-dimensional formulation of the finite element method (FEM) for treatment of problems involving SFRC structures. This formulation allows for the random distribution of steel fibers in the media without addition of freedom degrees in the system equations of the problem to be analyzed. In other words, the size of the system of equations used to solve a non-reinforced medium is the same as the one used to solve the reinforced counterpart. In the overview, it is shown that few works describing the numerical formulations for SFRC exist. The utilization of steel fibers such as reinforcement of cementitious materials significantly increase the quantity and the numbers of applications during recent decades. This increase of applications of steel fiber reinforced concrete is associated with the advantages of use when compared with plain concrete, e.g, improvement in compressive and tensile strength, better ductility and durability. SFRC has many structural applications in several areas of civil engineering (for example beams, slabs, tunnels), motivating the developments of numerical formulations for the analysis of this composite material. In this work, non-associative plasticity is adopted for the continuum and one dimensional plasticity is adopted to model fibers. Examples are presented in order to show the capabilities of the formulation.