Influence of the compressive fracture energy on the predicted breakout failure of fasteners

Concrete Cone (CC) failure of fasteners remains a challenging engineering problem in numerical simulation due to the mixed-mode fracture.For this reason, design of fasteners still heavily depends on empirical design rules from standards which come with limitations in applicability.One less researched influencing factor in numerical simulations of CC-failure is the compressive fracture energy of concrete.In this paper, a numerical study is carried out in the commercial Finite-Element software ANSYS Mechanical using Drucker-Prager model with Rankine's criterion i.e., the yield surface under compression is defined using Drucker-Prager criterion and the Rankine criterion bounds the tensile stresses for concrete.The influence of fracture energy under compression on the ultimate load and load-displacement behavior of fasteners under CC-failure as well the meshsensitivity is studied for two embedment depths.Strong influence of the compressive fracture energy on the ultimate load, load-displacement behavior and fracture pattern in the simulations could be identified.