ABSTRACT:

Structural engineers have to address the climate change challenge by designing sustainable and resilient structures. At this juncture, Electric Arc Furnace Slags (EAFS), a steel-industry waste, are used in replacement of natural aggregates to enhance concrete properties. Moreover, steel and synthetic fibers are added to improve the postcracking behavior while the traditional bar reinforcement enhances the tensile performance. This makes EAFS concrete substantially ductile compared to normal concrete, which contributes to a higher structural resiliency, and hence minimizes functionality disruptions. However the use of fiber and bar -reinforced EAFS concrete in structures is still limited due to the uncertainties introduced by EAFS and fibers. This justify the development of advanced modeling techniques (ie. Finite element Analysis, FEA), which can be used to predict the behavior of EAFS concrete structures at the designing stage. This work build up from the extensive work of the coauthors in the testing of EAFS concrete and, more recently, in the developed FEA of fiber-reinforced EAFS concrete. In this paper the modeling of bar reinforcement is added to the FEA to study the behavior of structural elements made with fiber-reinforced EAFS concrete. The presented FEA is validated through full-scale experiments (four-point flexural test), which shows that the presented FEA is appropriate. The presented numerical model enables to study phenomena difficult to study from experiments or in-situ such as the cracking. It is worth noting that the addition of steel fibers reduced the crack mouth opening displacement in 29.3% and the depth of the cracks in 12.7% in the presented EAFS concrete.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

The authors wish to express their gratitude to the following entities for having funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”, by the “European Union” [PID2020–113837RB-I00; PID2021–124203OB-100; RTI2018–097079-B-C31, PID2021–124203OB-100]; the Junta de Castilla y León (Regional Government) and ERDF [BU119P17, UIC-231]; the University of Burgos [Y135.GI]; the Basque Government [IT1619–22 SAREN research group]. We would like to thank CHRYSO and HORMOR for supplying the materials used in this research. This work has been partially supported by a Maria Zambrano research fellowship at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya funded by Ministerio de Universidades.