Mesoscale analysis of rubber particle effect on compressive strength of crumb rubber mortar

This research proposes a mesoscale model to investigate the effect of rubber particles on the mechanical behaviours of crumb rubber mortar (CRM). In this paper, CRM was viewed as a three-phase material consisting of rubber particles, mortar matrix, and interface transition zone (ITZ). Numerical simulations showed that the strength reduction was mainly affected by the rubber content. For CRM samples containing the same content of rubber but different particle distributions, the average compressive strength of the CRM model was similar, but with slightly different strength deviations. The numerical analysis also showed that idealizing the rubber particles as pores caused negligible errors in the compressive strength of the CRM. A prediction formula that could consider the increase in air content was proposed and used to calculate the simulation results of CRM, which deviated from the experimental values within an acceptable range.