High performance construction materials fracture and high cycle fatigue assessment based on accelerated PF-CZM

Abstract

Given the widespread application of high-performance materials in cyclic loaded infrastructure, a thorough understanding of the fracture and high-cycle fatigue behavior of high-performance materials is of critical importance. However, these behaviors predominantly rely on experimental methods, which are often costly, time-consuming and limited in generalizability. To address these issues, this paper proposes the constitution and high-cycle fatigue of Ultra-High Performance Concrete (UHPC) and High Strength Steel (HSS) within the Phase-Field Cohesive Zone Model (PF-CZM) framework. A generic stress-based failure criterion for UHPC is derived from the biaxial tensile test results to calculate crack driving force. Furthermore, a fatigue degradation function and an acceleration algorithm are integrated into the PF-CZM framework to enable efficient high-cycle fatigue simulations. In the acceleration algorithm, the envelope load is used to approximate the real cyclic load to avoid the simulation of each cycle, and the three-stage fatigue process is simulated through adjusting the cyclic increment adaptively. The proposed model successfully captures mixed-mode fracture and high-cycle fatigue behavior of UHPC and HSS, with validation provided through relevant experimental comparisons.