Concrete Design Based on Fracture Mechanics

At the Fall meeting of the American Concrete Institute in Philadelphia in 1990, ACI Committee 446 sponsored a technical paper session entitled “Design Based on Fracture Mechanics.” The purpose of the session was to present recent advances in our understanding or fracture in concrete in such a way that practitioners could understand and use it, and also to identify ways in which practitioners can make use of fracture mechanics in design of concrete structures. Currently, designers in the United States use the ACI 318 Building Code, which currently makes absolutely no use of fracture mechanics concepts. To enable designers to use fracture mechanics, a logical next step would be to incorporate these concepts into a revised building code.