Effect of softening function on the cohesive crack fracture parameters of concrete CT specimen

The paper presents numerical study on the fracture parameters of concrete compact tension test specimens of different sizes using cohesive crack model. As softening function is the main ingredient of the cohesive crack model, seven numbers of widely used softening functions are incorporated in the model based on enhanced algorithm. It is found that the difference between the highest and the lowest peak loads obtained using various softening functions (except linear) is less than about 9%. The peak load predicted by the linear softening curve is about 16% larger than that of mean peak load predicted by other softening functions. The cohesive crack model with linear softening yields the fracture process zones lower by approximately 30–50% than those obtained by using the other softening relations for specimen size range 200–600 mm. The numerical results are further compared with a reference test result available in the literature. It is observed that some of softening relations (except linear) predict the experimentally obtained peak load up to 6% of accuracy whereas the linear softening curve overestimates it by about 30%. The numerically gained softening branch of load-displacement curves compare well with the experimental observation.