The self-compacting concrete (SCC) was invented to overcome the compaction problems in deep sections, owing to its perfect workability characteristics. Steel fibers when used with SCC would affect the required fluidity characteristics but improve its impact resistance. In this research, an experimental work was conducted to evaluate the impact response of micro-steel fiber-reinforced SCC, under flexural impact. A 5.47 kg free-falling mass was dropped repeatedly from 100 mm height on the top center of 270 mm-length beam specimens. Eight mixtures with two design grades of 30 and 50 MPa were prepared to distinguish the normal and high-strength SCCs. The distinguishing variable for each design grade was the fiber content, where four volumetric contents of 0%, 0.5%, 0.75%, and 1.0% were used. The test results showed that the impact resistance and ductility were significantly improved due to the incorporation of micro-steel fibers. The percentage improvements were noticeably higher at failure stage than at cracking stage. For the 30 MPa mixtures, the maximum percentage improvements at cracking and failure stages were 543% and 836%, respectively. Weibull’s linear correlations with R2 values of 0.84 to 0.97 were obtained at the failure stage, which meant that the impact failure number followed the Wiebull distribution.
The ACI 544-2R introduced a qualitative test to compare the impact resistance of fibrous concretes under repeated falling-mass impact loads, which is considered to be a low-cost, quick solution for material-scale impact tests owing to the simplified apparatus, test setup and procedure, where none of the usual sophisticated sensors and data acquisition systems are required. However, previous studies showed that the test results are highly scattered with noticeably unacceptable variations, which encouraged researchers to try to use statistical tools to analyze the scattering of results and suggest modifications to reduce this unfavorable disadvantage. The current article introduces a state-of-the-art literature review on the previous and recent research on repeated impact testing of different types of fibrous concrete using the ACI 544-2R test, while focusing on the scattering of results and highlighting the adopted statistical distributions to analyze this scattering. The influence of different mixture parameters on the variation of the cracking and failure impact results is also investigated based on data from the literature. Finally, the article highlights and discusses the literature suggestions to modify the test specimen, apparatus and procedure to reduce the scattering of results in the ACI 544-2R repeated impact test. The conducted analyses showed that material parameters such as binder, aggregate and water contents in addition to the maximum size of aggregate have no effect on the variation of test results, while increasing the fiber content was found to have some positive influence on decreasing this variation. The survey conducted in this study also showed that the test can be modified to lower the unfavorable variations of impact and failure results.