Failure of Plain Concrete under Combined Stresses

Abstract

The initial phase of an investigation of the failure of plain concrete under combined stresses is presented. Previous investigations of the failure of plain concrete revealed that the correlation of various criteria with test data has been either inadequate or inconclusive. To obtain further evidence on failure of plain concrete, hollow cylinders were tested under varying combinations of torsion and compression. Data obtained from these tests indicated a direct correlation between normal and shearing octahedral stresses at failure. Within the limits of available data, the octahedral-stress criterion was generalized to include the effect of the third stress invariant, and in this form the proposed criterion was shown to be in satisfactory agreement with the previously reported data.