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Strain-hardening cementitious composites (SHCCs) are an attractive construction material, due to their obvious advantage of large tensile strain capacity with pseudo strain-hardening, whereas this advantage is obviously reduced when SHCC is used for RC strengthening. This study investigated, experimentally and numerically, the localised behaviour of SHCCs for RC strengthening, with a focus on crack elongation performance and the ductility reduction of SHCC for RC strengthening. The numerical investigation was implemented using a proposed scheme that considers the localised behaviour of SHCCs for strengthening RC structures with cracks. The effectiveness of the numerical scheme was confirmed through a comparison of experimental and numerical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strain hardening cementitious composites (SHCCs) have obvious advantages when used to strengthen reinforced concrete (RC) structures - high tensile and compressive strengths, as well as large tensile strain in uniaxial tensile behaviour. However, when used for flexural strengthening of RC members, the ductility of SHCC is reduced and the cracking behaviour of the SHCC strengthening layer varies with different layer thicknesses. In this paper, a zero-span tensile model using a fictitious material is proposed to assess the cracking behaviour of SHCC used for RC flexural strengthening, considering the localised behaviour of the SHCC on the cracked RC substrate member. In the model, the crack in the RC substrate member is represented by an artificial crack formed by two areas of fictitious material. The proposed model can evaluate the cracking behaviour of SHCC layers of varying thickness used for flexural strengthening of RC members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]