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Concreteis a favoured building material due to its ease of productionand use. Even though the concrete mix isdesigned to have a uniform strength throughout the entire member, casting, aswell as the basic characteristics of the concrete materials, could yield anon-homogeneous constitution, resulting in a concrete strength gradation as afunction of the depth of the member. A functionally continuous and smooth strengthgradation of the concrete member along its axis or section is defined as gradedconcrete. The objective of this researchis to analyse the influence of two different concrete compressivestrengths that composed the gradedconcrete member. Thestudy is split into two parts: theexperimental work describing and identifying the mechanical properties offunctionally graded concrete and the finite element analysis implementing theseproperty variations in a model. The results showed that the concrete gradationinfluenced the ultimate strength of a member negatively and altered the stressdistribution and displacement response of the specimen. |
