Experimental and mesoscale numerical investigation on the failure behavior of reinforced concrete under projectile-impact loading

Reinforced concrete is widely used and plays important roles in civil engineering and national defense. It also suffers from an obvious scale effect. Conducting a large-scale penetration experiment is necessary to study the dynamic response of reinforced-concrete under impact loading. In this study, experiments were conducted for a 100-mm large-caliber ovoid projectile to penetrate reinforcedconcrete targets at high speed. The damage mode, penetration depth, and crater diameter of the target were analyzed in detail. Owing to the reinforcement, concrete exhibits more complex heterogeneity and anisotropy, and the deformation, damage, and interaction of each component indicate an important effect on the mechanical properties of concrete. A fast and parallel modeling method of 3D mesoscale reinforced-concrete model based on the Voronoi technique was proposed, which solved the problems of large-scale arranged aggregates and intersection detections between the reinforcement and aggregates. The mesoscale numerical simulations were conducted in combination with the K&C model, and the effects of the projectile hitting and not hitting the reinforcements on the penetration depth, crater diameter, and ballistic trajectory were analyzed. The damage mode of the slabs and reinforcements, penetration depth of the projectile, and trajectory deflection were obtained. The numerical results show good agreement with the experimental results, which indicate that the mesoscale model can effectively and accurately predict the failure behavior of reinforced-concrete. © 2021, Science Press. All right reserved.