Experimental Investigation of the Confined Behavior of Concrete under Shear Loading at High Strain Rates

A new experimental technique has been developed to investigate the confined shear behavior of concrete under dynamic conditions. The technique is based on the ‘Punch through shear test’ and consists in pre-stressing a concrete sample prior to testing it under shear. The pre-confinement is applied by means of a metallic cell instrumented with gages to register the stresses during the test; it consists in deforming the cell with a compressive load and then inserting the specimen into the cell. When the load is released, the cell applies a confinement to the sample. Two notches are performed from each side of the specimen and a displacement is applied to the central part in order to produce shear inside the vertical ligament. Dynamics tests are done with the Split Hopkinson Bar setup where a striker, an incident and two output bars are used. Two sets of specimens have been tested, saturated and dry concrete.

A novel experimental method to characterise the shear strength of concrete based on pre-stressed samples. A comparison with existing techniques

Mode II shear fracture process can be observed in plain-concrete structures exposed to intensive loadings such as shock, blasting or projectile-impact. It is the reason why the quasi-static and dynamic shear fracturing properties of concrete need to be investigated. In previous works performed by Forquin and coauthors a passive confining cell was applied to PTS (Punch-Through-Shear) specimens in a similar way than in quasi-oedometric compression tests where metallic ring are used as passive confinement. However the change of confining level during the sample loading constitutes a main drawback of this technique. In the present work a novel testing method is proposed based on a pre-stressing of the sample. To do so, the concrete specimen is inserted into pre-stressed metallic cell. During the unloading stage confining stresses are transferred to the ligament of the sample. In a second stage, a differential displacement applied to the central part of the sample toward the side parts produces a shearing of the ligament. The experiments performed in static and dynamic conditions (SHPB testing) allow the shear response of concrete to be determined over a wide range of strain-rates. In the present communication, the testing technique and obtained results are compared to the obtained data with the previous experimental method.