A review on fracture properties of steel fiber reinforced concrete

In recent decades, the need for high-performance and cost-effective concrete has received considerable attention from both researchers and different construction industries due to the ever-growing demand for concrete. Steel fiber reinforced concrete (SFRC) is a popular material for its extremely high strength, high crack control, high fracture toughness, and good cost-effectiveness. This paper provides a thorough review of the fracture properties of SFRC. Specif-ically, the purpose of this paper is to emphasize the most compelling and feasible fracture toughness and other strength enhancements method for concrete using steel fiber (SF). Further-more, it comprehensively reviews fracture models of SFRC, double-K fracture model (DKFM), boundary effect model (BEM), fictitious crack model (FCM), effective crack model (ECM), nu-merical simulation model (NSM), the evaluation parameters for fracture of SFRC, as well as the test methods and techniques used to study fracture properties of SFRC. The effects of SF volume fraction and SF distribution on the fracture properties of SFRC are also presented in the paper. The results show that the fracture properties of SFRC increase significantly with the increase of randomly distributed SF volume fraction from 0 to 1.6%. It has also found that the fracture properties of aligned steel fiber reinforced concrete (ASFRC) are 1.3-1.79 times higher than those of randomly distributed SFRC. Yet, there are still many issues that need to be addressed in the application of SFRC in practical engineering. Hence, scholars and engineers must conduct further research to solve the fracture problems in practical engineering applications.