FRACTAL ANALYSIS OF FRACTURE IN CONCRETE

Experimental results indicate that propagation paths of cracks in conc rete are often irregular, producing rough fracture surfaces which are fractal. Based on dynamic analysis of microcrack coalescence, this pap er presents a statistical fractal model to describe the damage evoluti on of concrete. The model demonstrates that the mechanism of fracture surfaces formed in concrete is closely related to the dynamic processe s of the cascade coalescence of microcracks. A unimodal relation betwe en the fractal dimension and the coalescence threshold can qualitative ly explain the relation between fractal dimension and fracture energy.