Strength Analysis of Resin Mortar by Reliability Concept

Abstract

Resin concrete has recently been attracting general attention as a light weight structural material, and the amount of work on design and properties of resin concrete is increasing steadily in recent years. Resin concrete is composed of resin, fine powder, sand and gravel. In the case that fine powder and sand are used as fillers, it is called resin mortar. They can be considered to be a kind of particle dispersed composites. Such materials generally show a considerable spread in fracture stress, so that a statistical treatment is required to deal with their strength properties. The tensile strength of composite materials is known to depend on composite morphology, existence of voids and brittle property of particle, matrix and bonding surface.
In this paper, the tensile strength analysis is undertaken on a particle dispersed composite consisting of matrix, n kinds of particles and void. The specimen is divided into cross sectional elements and the law of mixture is applied to the strength of the unit cell. The Weibull distribution is adopted for the distribution of the strength of the element in composite materials, because it has an advantage of easiness of treatment over the normal distribution, and because the two distributions are close each other within the range of 40 percent of the coefficient of variation.
The results of our analysis are found to agree very well with the experiments on resin mortar.