Fibre-reinforced, self-compacting concrete flow modelled by smooth particle hydrodynamics

A Lagrangian particle-based method, the smooth particle hydrodynamics, is used to model the flow of ultra-high-performance, self-compacting concretes containing short steel fibres which behave like a non-Newtonian fluid described by a Bingham-type constitutive model. An incompressible smooth particle hydrodynamics method is used to simulate the flow after the kink in the shear stress against the shear strain rate constitutive equation is first appropriately smoothed out. One of the key factors that ensures the strength and durability of an ultra-high-performance concrete is the orientation of the fibres within the concrete structures cast from the ultra-high performance, self-compacting concretes. Therefore, this paper mainly focuses on developing a numerical methodology to determine how the fibres distribute and orient themselves during the ultra-high performance, self-compacting concrete flow. For this, a novel approach which can be easily combined with the continuum flow model developed in a previous study by the authors is proposed here. A number of numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.