Abstract
In the blast demolition of reinforced concrete structures, the effect of rebar must be considered. However, this effect has not been fully investigated. Therefore, in this study, the effect of partially dense regions on the propagation behavior of stress waves and crack initiation in reinforced concrete was investigated using a polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) plate pierced with an aluminum bar. Two visualization techniques, namely the photoelasticity and digital image correlation (DIC) methods, were used to measure stress wave propagation and crack initiation. It was found that in a blast fracture, crack formation initiated near the rebar, even though its role is to increase structural strength. Furthermore, the stress wave visualization results obtained using the photoelasticity method and the strain propagation results obtained using the DIC method showed good agreement. This suggests that the DIC method can be used to visualize and quantitatively evaluate the propagation of stress waves in nontransparent materials, for which the photoelasticity method is not applicable.
