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Compressive strength of rectangular columns made with ECC and confined with rectangular stirrups

  • Author / Creator
    Wong, Wai Man
  • Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) is a type of high-performance fiber-reinforced cementitious composites (HPFRCC) which is designed to achieve high tensile strain capacity with strain hardening effect during the post-cracking response. The high tensile ductility of ECC with steady-state crack width has the potential to reduce the wide cracks and fracture problems associated with critical loads and large imposed deformations in structural members made with conventional concrete. Previous studies have demonstrated that the unique characteristics of ECC offer high damage tolerance capacity in tension – increasing the durability, safety, and sustainability of structures subjected to severe loading. Under compression, however, there is a lack of data regarding confinement effects on reinforced-ECC (RECC) members. Thus, the design of ECC structures is usually made by assuming the ECC behaves in the same way as conventional concrete under compression, which can be inaccurate, uneconomical, or unsafe. An experimental test program on confined ECC columns is performed in this study. Sixteen 100 mm x 100 mm x 300 mm ECC square columns, consisting of one set of unconfined ECC and three sets of confined ECC with 1%, 1.5% and 2% transverse steel content were fabricated and tested under monotonic compressive load until failure. The force-displacement and stress-strain relationships in the longitudinal direction were measured. An empirical stress-strain model for rectangularly confined high-strength ECC was developed based on an existing model for high-strength conventional concrete. The model was validated with the experimental results using an off-the-shelf material concrete model implemented into an open-source finite-element (FE) software, OpenSEES. After validation, a parametric study was conducted on a reinforced-ECC (RECC) frame and a reinforced-concrete (RC) control frame to evaluate their ductility capacities and cracking responses.

  • Subjects / Keywords
  • Graduation date
    Spring 2018
  • Type of Item
    Thesis
  • Degree
    Master of Science
  • DOI
    https://doi.org/10.7939/R32J68K5M
  • License
    This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.