Method for Determination of Tensile Properties of Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC)

Today, ECC has been developed to a stage where the material is being used in eld testing and limited full scale constructed facilities. However, the lack of reliable, practical, standardized test methods for determination of the strain hardening properties of the material constitutes a signi cant obstacle for day-to-day structural engineering design and material quality control during construction execution. In practice a simple and robust test method is required on a construction site. The uniaxial tension test (UTT) is regarded too complicated to serve as such. Instead, the widely adopted four point bending test (FPBT) may be used for this purpose, provided that an appropriate interpretation of the test data is available. The present paper presents a contribution in this direction. Sectional analysis of ECC beams in the strain-hardening stage is used in a parametric analysis aimed at revealing the ne details of correlation uniqueness between the tensile stress-strain (σ-ε) curve parameters of an ECC and its FPBT load-de ection diagram. Further, an inverse analysis designated for the determination of the strain hardening properties is described. Finally, experimental results based on FPBT test results are presented.