Papers abstract:

Insulated concrete sandwich panels are comprised of two outers concrete wythes and an inner layer of foam insulation. They have been increasingly used because of their advantages of light weight and energy efficiency. Various shear connectors can be used to connect the two outers concrete wythes. More recently, Fiber-Reinforced Polymer (FRP) shear connectors have been used, which can eliminate thermal bridging and improve the thermal performance. Typical approaches to Finite Element (FE) analysis treat static and dynamic analyses separately. However, due to the flexibility of the FRP shear connectors and the cracking of the concrete in insulated concrete sandwich panels, a nonlinear static analysis model would often diverge early based on a preliminary FE study conducted by the authors. To address this issue, a nonlinear explicit dynamic FE model using ABAQUS_ was developed, which can study both the panels’ static behavior under typical flexural loading and dynamic behavior under blast loading. Nonlinear material properties were incorporated and damaged plasticity model was used to model concrete in both compression and tension. In order to simulate the static behavior, the time loading control was applied to the FE model to slow down the rate of loading to smoothly capture the response. For dynamic analysis under blast loading, a verification study was conducted first using the developed FE model, where good correlations can be obtained between the FE and test results on a panel tested in a previous study. The FE model was further used to study the dynamic behavior of two panels under blast loading: one is a solid concrete panel and the other is an insulated concrete sandwich panel. It can be concluded that, although the insulated concrete sandwich panel is lighter, it still performs relatively well compared to the solid panel under blast loading. Therefore, it is promising to use insulated concrete sandwich panels for both conventional and blast-resistant structures.

Product Overview:
This tutorial video provides an in-depth exploration of the mechanical behavior of concrete foam, as discussed in the referenced ISI paper. Concrete foams are widely used in modern construction due to their high strength-to-weight ratio, thermal insulation properties, and energy absorption capabilities. Understanding their mechanical response under loading is crucial for optimizing their applications. This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide to modeling concrete foam. Key simulation steps include:

• Defining the material properties of concrete foam, including density and porosity.
• Implementing the Johnson-Holmquist (JH2) material to model the explosion instead of Concrete Damage Plasticity (CDP) model, which is used in the ISI paper.
• Setting up and applying boundary conditions and loading scenarios.
• Running the simulation and interpreting stress-strain responses.
• Validating results by comparing numerical predictions with experimental data.

In this tutorial, compression behavior and failure mechanisms of concrete foam are simulated, according to data from the work of Hopkins et al.