Low-Velocity Impact Behaviour of Plain Concrete Beams

Concrete structures are designed and constructed to serve their anticipated service life, generally with minimal consideration of accidental loads such as impact or explosion. The behaviour of reinforced concrete structures under impact loads has been widely discussed in the last decades, however, there are few studies on the behaviour of plain concrete under impact loading. This paper presents a finite element model of plain concrete beams using nonlinear finite element analysis. The numerical results are compared to experimental data taken from an existing study. The experiments consist of drop-weight tests with varying drop-heights. A parametric study is conducted with respect to the concrete material model and mesh size of elements in order to fine-tune the model and to understand the dynamic response of the beam under low-velocity impact load.