Experiment Studies on Fracture Energy of Cement Paste and Mortar

As cement-based composite, concrete can be properly represented by three phases in microstructure: cement paste, aggregate as well as interfacial transition zone between them. As the matrix compositions of concrete, fracture properties of cement paste and mortar have great influence on fracture performance of concrete, and fracture energy is an important parameter for concrete non-linear fracture mechanics research. Therefore, three-point bending beams of cement paste and mortar with different sizes and strengths were tested. A complete load-deflection (P-δ) curve was directly obtained, and a fit was made for the tail of the P-δ curve using power and exponential function, respectively. And then the fitting results of the two function were compared. It was found that with the increase of specimen size the influence of tail curve on fracture energy is decrease，and considering the influence of tail curve, fracture energy of cement paste and mortar are size-independent. The discussion on the obtained results was made.