A new experimental technique for the analysis of concrete under high triaxial loading

Abstract
Concrete is a building material used for sensitive infrastructures like dams or nuclear power reactors; however its behaviour remains badly known under extreme dynamical loading like rock falls, explosions or ballistic impacts. It is due both to the difficulty of reproducing experimentally such a loading and to the intrinsic complexity of concrete behaviour. Predicting its response under dynamic loading needs the experimental characterization of its static behaviour in compression under very high confinement. This paper first presents a new large capacity triaxial press and the manufacturing and testing procedures developed to perform the tests. Plain concrete specimens (centimetric aggregate dimension) were submitted to different loading paths up to an ultimate state associated to failure.