Brittle failure kinetics model for concrete

A new constitutive model is proposed for the modeling of penetration and large stress waves in concrete. Rate effects are incorporated explicitly into the damage evolution law, hence the term brittle failure kinetics. The damage variable parameterizes a family of Mohr-Coulomb strength curves. The model, which has been implemented in the CTH code, has been shown to reproduce some distinctive phenomena that occur in penetration of concrete targets. Among these are the sharp spike in deceleration of a rigid penetrator immediately after impact. Another is the size scale effect, which leads to a nonlinear scaling of penetration depth with penetrator size. This paper discusses the theory of the model and some results of an extensive validation effort