Impact resistance of steel fiber-reinforced self-compacting concrete

Among the adopted test methods to evaluate the impact resistance of materials and structural members is the drop-weight impact test. The ACI 544-2R repeated drop-weight impact testing technique was used in this research to evaluate the impact resistance of Self-Compacting Concrete (SCC) reinforced with micro-steel fibers. SCC concrete sample were made with two concrete grades and four fiber volumetric contents of 0, 0.5, 0.75 and 1.0 %. Another investigated parameter is the shape of the test specimen, where disk specimens (150 mm diameter and 65 mm thickness), 70 mm cubes and 70×70×260 mm beams were tested. The experimental results showed continuous improvement of impact resistance of SCC as the fiber content increased with percentage improvements ranging from 110 to 1200 % compared to the plain SCC. The failure impact resistance of the high strength SCC was higher than that of normal strength SCC regardless of specimen type and fiber content. The test results also showed that the impact resistance of disk specimens were clearly higher than those of cubes and beams and has more uniform variation with fiber content.