• Journal of the Korean Recycled Construction Resources Institute
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.325-332
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• 2020

In the safety diagnosis of fire-damaged concrete structures, it is difficult to evaluate the strength and changes in materials due to high temperatures with the existing durability analysis method. In particular, the compressive strength of specimen with different damage levels by thickness is used as a representative value for reducing the compressive strength of the structural member. In this study, a heating experiment was performed with only top face heating and fully heating conditions at 400℃ to 800℃. After heating, splitting tensile test and color analysis were performed to sliced specimens with a thickness of 20mm accompanied by the compressive test of a fully heated specimen. As a result of the experiment, the compressive strength reduction rate calculated from the splitting tensile strength of every sliced specimen appeared to be within 10% of the fully heated specimen on aver age, and the hue value analysis showed consistent color values were observed by red at 400℃-600℃ and gray at 700℃ or above. It follows that the techniques proposed in this study are reasonably assessable to estimate heated temperature and residual compressive strength and damage depth of concrete.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.439-446
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• 2013

The objective of this study is to evaluate the workability and various mechanical properties of heavyweight magnetite concrete and examine the reliability of the design equations specified in code provisions. The main parameters investigated were the water-to-cement ratio and substitution level of normal-weight coarse aggregate (granite) for magnetite. The oven-dried unit weight of concrete tested ranged between 2446 and $3426kg/m^3$. The measured mechanical properties included compressive strength development, stress-strain curve, splitting tensile strength, moduli of elasticity and rupture, and bond stress-slip relationship of concrete. Test results revealed that the initial slump of heavyweight magnetite concrete increased as the substitution level of normal-weight coarse aggregate increases. The substitution level of normal-weight coarse aggregate had little influence on the compressive strength and tensile resistance capacity of heavyweight concrete, while it significantly affected the modulus of elasticity and stress-strain curves of such concrete. The design equations of ACI 349-06 and CEB-FIP provisions mostly conservatively predicted the mechanical properties of heavyweight magnetite concrete, but the empirical equations for modulus of elasticity and splitting tensile strength need to be modified considering the unit weight of concrete.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.45 no.2
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• pp.205-218
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• 2022

Proper calculation of splitting tensile strength (STS) of concrete has been a crucial task, due to the wide use of concrete in the construction sector. Following many recent studies that have proposed various predictive models for this aim, this study suggests and tests the functionality of three hybrid models in predicting the STS from the characteristics of the mixture components including cement compressive strength, cement tensile strength, curing age, the maximum size of the crushed stone, stone powder content, sand fine modulus, water to binder ratio, and the ratio of sand. A multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network incorporates invasive weed optimization (IWO), cuttlefish optimization algorithm (CFOA), and electrostatic discharge algorithm (ESDA) which are among the newest optimization techniques. A dataset from the earlier literature is used for exploring and extrapolating the STS behavior. The results acquired from several accuracy criteria demonstrated a nice learning capability for all three hybrid models viz. IWO-MLP, CFOA-MLP, and ESDA-MLP. Also in the prediction phase, the prediction products were in a promising agreement (above 88%) with experimental results. However, a comparative look revealed the ESDA-MLP as the most accurate predictor. Considering mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) index, the error of ESDA-MLP was 9.05%, while the corresponding value for IWO-MLP and CFOA-MLP was 9.17 and 13.97%, respectively. Since the combination of MLP and ESDA can be an effective tool for optimizing the concrete mixture toward a desirable STS, the last part of this study is dedicated to extracting a predictive formula from this model.

• Journal of the Korean Recycled Construction Resources Institute
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.359-366
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• 2022

In this paper, the effect of compression levels on the strengths of porous concrete using bottom ash aggregates was analyzed. Coal bottom ash (CBA) was used as aggregate in porous concrete in this study. The aggregate size types used in the CBA concrete mixtures were catagorized into two different ones. One included only a single aggregate particle size and the other included hybrid aggregate particles mixed at a ratio of 8:2 volume proportion. The water-binder ratio was fixed at 0.30, and the compression levels were applied at 0.5, 1.5, and 3.0 MPa valu es to fabricate a porou s concrete specimen. The total porosity, compressive, splitting tensile, and flexural tensile strengths were tested and analyzed. When the compression level increased, the total porosity decreased, meanwhile the compressive, split tensile, and flexural tensile strengths increased. The total porosity of concrete using hybrid aggregate was lower and the strength was larger than those of concrete using single-type aggregate. Finally, the correlation between the total porosity, compressive, split tensile, and flexural tensile strengths of porous concrete were presented. The total porosity and strength characteristics showed an inversely proportional correlation.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.623-635
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• 2018

In order to research the influence of different recycled aggregate contents on the mechanical properties of pervious concrete, the experimental study and numerical simulation analysis of the mechanical properties of pervious concrete with five kinds of recycled aggregates contents (0%, 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%) are carried out in this paper. The experimental test were first performed on concrete specimens of different sizes in order to determine the influence of recycled aggregate on the compressive strength and splitting tensile strength, direct tension strength and bending strength. Then, the development of the internal cracks of pervious concrete under different working conditions is studied more intuitively by $PFC^{3D}$. The experimental results show that the concrete compressive strength, tensile strength and bending strength decrease with the increase of the recycled aggregate contents. This trend of reduction is not only related to the brittleness of recycled aggregate concrete, but also to the weak viscosity of recycled aggregate and cement paste. It is found that the fracture surface of pervious concrete with recycled aggregate is smoother than that of natural aggregate pervious concrete by $PFC^{3D}$, which means that the bridging effect is weakened in the stress transfer between the left and right sides of the crack. Through the analysis of the development of the internal cracks, the recycled aggregate concrete generated more cracks than the natural aggregate concrete, which means that the recycled aggregate concrete is easier to form a coalescence fracture surface and eventually break.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.23 no.5
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• pp.543-555
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• 2017

The mechanical properties of steel fiber reinforced high strength concrete (SFRHSC) made with binary and ternary blends of metakaolin (MK) and ground pumice (GP) are investigated in this study. The investigated properties are ultrasonic pulse velocity ($U_{pv}$), compressive strength ($f_c$), flexural strength ($f_f$) and splitting tensile strength ($f_{st}$) of SFRHSC. A total of 16 steel fiber reinforced concrete mixtures were produced by a total binder content of $500kg/m^3$ for determining the effects of MK and GP on the mechanical properties. The design $f_c$ was acquired from 70 to 100 MPa by using a low water-binder ratio of 0.2. The test results exhibit that high strength concrete can be obtained by replacing the cement with MK and GP. Besides, correlations between these results are executed for comprehending the relationship between mechanical properties of SFRHSC and the strong correlations are observed between these properties. Moreover, two models in the gene expression programming (GEP) for predicting the $f_c$ of SFRHSC made with binary and ternary blends of MK and GP have been developed. The results obtained from these models are compared with the experimental results. These comparisons proved that the results of equations obtained from these models seem to agree with the experimental results.

• Geomechanics and Engineering
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• v.12 no.6
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• pp.919-933
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• 2017

A series of Brazilian tests under diameter compression for disc specimens was carried out to investigate the strength and failure behavior by using acoustic emission (AE) and photography monitoring technique. On the basis of experimental results, load-displacement curves, AE counts, real-time crack evolution process, failure modes and strength property of granite specimens containing two pre-existing holes were analyzed in detail. Two typical types of load-displacement curves are identified, i.e., sudden instability (type I) and progressive failure (type II). In accordance with the two types of load-displacement curves, the AE events also have different responses. The present experiments on disc specimens containing two pre-existing holes under Brazilian test reveal four distinct failure modes, including diametrical splitting failure mode (mode I), one crack coalescence failure mode (mode II), two crack coalescences failure mode (mode III) and no crack coalescence failure mode (mode IV). Compared with intact granite specimen, the disc specimen containing two holes fails with lower strength, which is closely related to the bridge angle. The failure strength of pre-holed specimen first decreases and then increases with the bridge angle. Finally, a preliminary interpretation was proposed to explain the strength evolution law of granite specimen containing two holes based on the microscopic observation of fracture plane.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.451-463
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• 2021

Inorganic basalt fiber (BF) is a novel sort of commercial concrete fiber which is made with basalt rocks. Previous studies have not sufficiently handled the behavior of self-compacted concrete, at elevated temperature, containing basalt fiber. Present endeavor covers experimental work to examine the characteristics of this material at high temperature considering different fiber content and applied temperature. Different tests were carried out to measure the mechanical properties such as compressive strength (fc), modulus of elasticity (E), Poisson's ratio, splitting tensile strength (fsplit), flexural strength (fflex), and slant shear strength (fslant) of HSC and hybrid concrete. Gene expression programming (GEP) was employed to propose new constitutive relationships depending on experimental data. It was noticed from the testing records that there is no remarkable effect of BF on the Poisson's ratio and modulus of elasticity of self-compacted concrete. The flexural strength of basalt fiber self-compacted concrete was not sensitive to temperature in comparison to other mechanical properties of concrete. Fiber volume fraction of 0.25% was found to be the optimum to some extend according to degradation of strength. The proposed GEP models were in good matching with the experimental results.

• Advances in concrete construction
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.431-444
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• 2023

This study investigated the use of latex-modified sand concrete reinforced with sisal fibers (LMSC) as a repair material. Notably, no prior research has explored the application of LMSC for this purpose. This paper examines the interface bond strength and the type of failure between LMSC as a repair material and the normal concrete (NC) substrate utilising four different surfaces: without surface preparation as a reference (SR), hand hammer (HA), sandblasted (SB), and grooved (GR). The bond strength was measured by bi-surface shear, splitting tensile, and pull-off strength tests at 7, 28, and 90 days. Scanning electron microscopy analysis was also performed to study the microstructure of the interface between the normal concrete substrate and the latex-modified sand concrete reinforced with sisal fibers. The results of this study indicate that LMSC has bonding strength with NC, especially for HR and SB surfaces with high roughness. Therefore, substrate NC surface roughness is essential in increasing the bonding strength and adhesion. Eventually, The LMSC has the potential to repair and rehabilitate concrete structures.

• Advances in nano research
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.533-539
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• 2023

This study aims to examine four machine learning (ML)-based models for their potential to estimate the splitting tensile strength (STS) of manufactured sand concrete (MSC). The ML models were trained and tested based on 310 experimental data points. Stone nanopowder content (SNPC), curing age (CA), and water-to-cement (W/C) ratio were also studied for their impacts on the STS of MSC. According to the results, the support vector regression (SVR) model had the highest correlation with experimental data. Still, all of the optimized ML models showed promise in estimating the STS of MSC. Both ML and laboratory results showed that MSC with 10% SNPC improved the STS of MSC.