COMPUTATIONALLY EFFICIENT MODELING OF THE CYCLIC BEHAVIOR OF REINFORCED CONCRETE STRUCTURAL MEMBERS UNDER ULTIMATE LIMIT STATE CONDITIONS

Abstract eng:
During the last decades, many constitutive models have been proposed for simulating the behavior of reinforced concrete structures under cyclic loading. Most of the approaches are based on uniaxial constitutive laws with strain softening and tension stiffening characteristics. These studies indicate the necessity of a 3D constitutive law without adding parameters, which are not associated with the physical behavior of concrete at a material level. The purpose of this paper is to propose a computationally efficient numerical method that will be able to simulate accurately the behavior of a wide range of reinforced concrete structural members under ultimate limit cyclic loading conditions. The proposed method is based on the experiments and the concrete modelling of Kotsovos and Pavlovic (1995). The combination of this theory with the smeared crack approach treats cracking by redistributing the cracked stresses to the surrounding concrete volume. The concrete domain is simulated by 8- and 20-noded hexahedral elements. Steel reinforcement is modeled with truss and natural beam-column flexibility based elements, which are considered embedded inside the hexahedral concrete mesh. Additionally, the use of a proposed flexible crack closing criterion, which is proved herein to be crucial for the numerical stability of the cyclic loading procedure, provides stability in the nonlinear analysis even for cases when the loading is close to the load carrying-capacity of the specimens. Therefore, the proposed algorithm that describes the numerical treatment of the crack opening and closure under cyclic behavior, is presented in this work. The numerical accuracy of the proposed method is also demonstrated herein by comparing the numerically predicted force-deflection curves with the corresponding experimental results found in the international literature.

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