Fatigue life and cracking characterization of engineered cementitious composites (ECC) under flexural cyclic load

This paper presents a study on cracking characterization of engineered cementitious composites (ECC) under flexural cyclic load using digital image correlation (DIC) technique. Five stress levels, namely 0.65, 0.75, 0.8, 0.85 and 0.9 of the flexural strength, were applied. Strain map at the side surface was obtained by DIC and used to drive evolution of the midspan deflection, damage pattern, maximum crack width, number of cracks, and crack width distribution with respect to the normalized number of cycles. The stress level was found to have a significant influence on the cracking behavior of ECC under flexural cyclic load. Regardless of the applied stress level, most of the crack widths are in the range between 20 and 80 μm. In the end, a two-dimension Gauss function was used to correlate the crack width distribution with normalized number of cycle and shows satisfactory results.