The application of waste tire rubber as aggregates in concrete can help to reduce carbon emissions and achieve green gross domestic product (GDP). However, civil engineers still have concerns about using rubberized concrete in structural members. For the safety of structures, the bearing strength of concrete is a very important parameter to be considered in the design. This paper presented the first experimental and numerical study on the bearing strength of crumb rubber concrete. Prisms of both normal concrete and crumb rubber concrete were tested with loading plates of varying sizes. The test results show that the failure modes and deformation behavior of crumb rubber concrete specimens with different rubber contents were similar to those of normal concrete, and the bearing strength of crumb rubber concrete can be well predicted by current standards for normal concrete. Finite element analysis was performed to further determine the effect of rubber content on the bearing strength of concrete. Proper parameter values for modeling crumb rubber concrete by the concrete damaged plasticity model were investigated. Through the numerical analysis, the reason the rubber content does not have an important effect on the bearing strength of crumb rubber concrete with similar compressive strength was found to be that the influence of rubber content on the tri-axial compression behavior of concrete and the ratio of concrete tensile strength to compressive strength is small. The experimental and numerical results presented in this study provide the insights needed to guide the design of structures utilizing crumb rubber concrete.
Keywords: bearing strength; constitutive model; crumb rubber concrete; partially loaded; rubber content.