Mesoscopic Analysis of the Behavior of Porous Concrete under Impact Loading

Porous concrete is a special type of cementitious material incorporating a high amount of meso-sized air pores that makes its mechanical characteristics markedly different from normal concrete. The objective of this numerical study is mesoscopically analyzing the behavior of porous concrete under dynamic loading. In the finite element analyses, explicit direct integration method was adopted. Concrete Damage Plasticity Model was selected to define the material properties of the cementitious phases. With the aim of realistically representing porous concrete as a four-phase material, a mesh generation program was developed where each phase was separately defined. In order to better investigate the effects of the properties of pores, model porous concretes were also analyzed in the form of plain concrete meshes incorporating circular pores. The numerical analysis results of real concrete mixtures were in good agreement with the experimental results both in terms of quantifying the impact strength as well as demonstrating a realistic crack pattern formation for the porous concretes that have been analyzed.