Determination of the Mohr-Coulomb Material Parameters for Concrete under Indirect Tensile Test

Abstract

This paper presents determination of the Mohr-Coulomb material parameters for concrete under indirect tensile testing, design of experiments and numerical simulations. Experiments are designed to control input variables associated with inhomogeneous starting material, sample preparation and testing equipment. Statistical analysis of the experimental data is applied in order to correlate material's deformational behaviour with change in cement content. Presented paper discusses a simple method, based on experimental and theoretical framework, to determine two material parameters for concrete: cohesion (c) and angle of internal friction (φ) from indirect tensile test. Cohesion is obtained from experimental results using elastic and plastic theory of concrete deformation. Prandtl's theory is applied to obtain the angle of internal friction from measured bearing capacity and cohesion. Numerical analysis by finite-element method is used for verification of experimental results, employing step-by-step integration procedure for solving the boundary value problem.