Evaluation of elastic failure criteria in numerical modeling of uniaxial compression test using the Edinburgh Bonded Particle Method

The Edinburgh Bonded Particle Method (EBPM) can be used to represent a cementitious heterogeneous medium by spherical particles linked by bonds that break when any strength (tensile, compressive, and/or shear) is exceeded. Indeed, the controlling failure mode is associated with the first of these limit stresses that are exceeded. The main issue is that this elastic failure criterion ignores the fact that the bond breakage has a multiaxial nature. Given this issue, this work computationally implements two multiaxial stress failure criteria (Mohr-Coulomb and Zhou-Wu) to be employed in models using the EBPM. These implementations are used to simulate destructive unconfined uniaxial compression tests of cylindrical concrete specimens. The obtained results are also compared to the numerical results obtained by Brown and the analytical constitutive curve proposed by the Eurocode. From the analysis, it is concluded that the elastic failure criterion by Zhou- Wu achieves a better fit with respect to the analytical compression strength, being able to characterize the failure plane as well as simulate the propagation of cracks. The results also show that this approach can be useful to assess the behavior of granular materials with a cementitious matrix.