Flow simulation of fiber reinforced self compacting concrete using Lattice Boltzmann method

Self compacting concrete (SCC) is a promising material in the civil engineering industry. One of the benefits of the SCC is a fast and simplified casting followed by decreased labor costs. The SCC as any other type of concrete has a significantly lower tensile and shear strength in comparison to the compression strength and, therefore, it needs to be reinforced. Fiber reinforced concrete is an alternative to traditional stirrups reinforcement leading to lowered labor costs. To be able to access mechanical properties of the fiber reinforced concrete, knowledge of final spread and directions of fibers is necessary. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) comes to play at this stage. Formulation of a possible CFD model that is able to solve multi-phase and multi component non-Newtonian flow with complex boundary conditions and fiber suspension and preferably in reasonable time brings a very challenging task. A relatively new group of models Lattice Boltzmann Modeling (LBM) is presented in this paper. The conventional LBM is modified to include fiber and particle suspensions and non-Newtonian rheology and is used to model the fiber reinforced self compacting concrete flow. Originality Application of Lattice Boltzmann Modeling to the field of fiber reinforced self compacting concrete is a novelty. It is the first paper dealing with multiphase flow with fiber shaped particle suspension and non-Newtonian rheology. Chief contributions One of the main contributions presented by the paper is the ability to predict final dispersion and orientation of fibers in the fiber reinforced self compacting concrete and thus to allocate possible problematic places. Such a prediction is not possible in other conventional methods in a comparable computational time.