Studies on the Behavior of Steel Fibre-Reinforced Concrete (SFRC) Under Monotonic Loading in Flexure: A Systematic and Simplified Finite Element Model for Assessing the Structural Performance

The conduction of laboratory experiments on concrete is very costlier and time-consuming. Hence numerical simulation technique like Finite Element Analysis (FEA) which is used in industries and research centers to analyze the behavior of various structural components has made it possible to model and simulate the complex behavior of reinforced concrete elements. This paper presents a nonlinear Finite Element Analysis (FEA) carried out to simulate the load–deflection behavior of Control Concrete (CC) beam and Steel Fiber-Reinforced Concrete (SFRC) beams under monotonic loading in flexure. The objective of this study is to investigate and validate the load–deflection characteristics of M20 grade CC and SFRC beams with hooked-end steel fibers of aspect ratio 50 (a/d = 50) with steel fibre dosages of 1.0, 1.25, 1.5, and 1.75% of total volume of concrete. FE studies were carried out on both CC beam and SFRC beam which were analyzed using FEM software package ANSYS Mechanical APDL 2022 R2. From the FE analyses, load–deflection responses and crack patterns were obtained and validated with the referred experimental results. The load–deflection responses obtained from the FE studies showed good correlations with the experimental plots. Hence, modeling of SFRC beams can be adoptable in ANSYS and the proposed FE models were found to be reliable for analyzing the flexural behavior of SFRC member subjected to monotonic loading.