## 6 Conclusions  
The importance of this research is attributable to the fact that the inelastic behavior of compressed high-strength concrete specimens is practically not pronounced in longitudinal deformations and therefore is not even analyzed. Consequently, high-strength concrete is considered to be a pure brittle material, which significantly limits its applications, especially under dynamic loads. For this reason, the experimental investigation of normal strength concrete at relatively high loading rates was conducted in order to prove the effectiveness of using transverse deformations as an indicator for the interpretation of high-strength concrete behavior.  
The obtained experimental results and their comparison with high-strength concrete specimen behavior showed good convergence of such parameters such as Poisson's ratio and the ratio of transverse to longitudinal deformations in the inelastic stage of concrete behavior. The proposed theoretical failure pattern for compressed cylindrical concrete specimens, which includes an unbroken circular core surrounded by separate vertical wedge-shaped elements, was also experimentally confirmed. Additionally, the ratio between the initial specimen's cross-section area and the destroyed one was obtained as approximately equal to 2, which corresponds to the structural phenomenon.  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline
**Specimen No.** & \(\epsilon_{c}\)_el_, \%o & \(\epsilon_{ct}\)_el_, \%o & \(\
u\) \\ \hline
1 & 0.780 & 0.143 & 0.18 \\
2 & 0.829 & 0.161 & 0.19 \\
3 & 1.004 & 0.162 & 0.16 \\ Average & 0.871 & 0.155 & 0.18 \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 7: Experimental values of maximum elastic strains, ultimate transverse strains, and Poisson’s ratios for HSC (following [6]).  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline
**Specimen No.** & \(\
u\) & \(\frac{\epsilon_{trans1}}{\epsilon_{c1}}\) & \(\frac{\epsilon_{trans1}/\epsilon_{c1}}{\
u}\) \\ \hline
1 & 0.18 & 0.34 & 1.89 \\
2 & 0.19 & 0.29 & 1.53 \\
3 & 0.16 & 0.29 & 1.81 \\ Average & 0.18 & 0.31 & 1.74 \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 8: Relationships between experimental Poisson’s ratio values, transverse, and longitudinal strains at ULS (following [6]).  
Thus, the approach of using transverse deformations for analyzing concrete performance proves that from the viewpoint of transverse deformations, high-strength concrete behaves inelastically and not as a brittle material. In our opinion, further investigation of this phenomenon can form a basis for the more accurate and effective design of high-strength concrete structures.  
Conceptualization, I.I.; methodology, I.I.; I.F. and Y.R.; validation, I.I.; I.F. and Y.R.; investigation, I.F., I.I., and Y.R.; resources, I.I. and Y.R.; data curation, I.F., I.I., and Y.R.; formal analysis, I.F.; writing--original draft preparation, I.F., I.I., and Y.R.; writing--review and editing, I.I., I.F., and Y.R. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.  
This research received no external funding. This research was conducted with the assistance of the Center for Integration in Science, Ministry of Aliyah and Integration, the State of Israel.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.