ON THE CONTINUUM STRONG DISCONTINUITY APPROACH TO MODELLING OF CRACKING IN R.C. STRUCTURES

J. OLIVER; A.E. HUESPE; G. DIAZ; P.J. SÁNCHEZ

París, Francia

Workshop; Workshop: Control of cracking in R.C. Structures: a major step towards sustainability; 2009

Numerical tools for modelling of cracking in reinforced concrete structures have experienced important achievements in the last years. The appearance of new computational technologies allows overcoming some of the drawbacks of previous approaches, increasing robustness and decreasing the computational costs when applied to plain concrete. On the other hand, reinforced concrete can be envisaged as a fiber-reinforced composite material where rebars are long-fibres compounds. Therefore, modelling technologies that have classically been applied to composite materials, like mixing theories, can also apply to reinforced concrete. This work presents an specific setting for modelling cracking and in reinforced concrete, combining the aforementioned approaches: a) a matrix material (concrete) and an oriented fiber material (rebars in different directions) are considered in every material point as basic compounds of the composite material (reinforced concrete) an b) the continuum strong discontinuity approach to material failure (CSDA) [1-3] and finite elements with embedded discontinuities (E-FEM) [4] techniques are used to model material failure (cracking) of the composite material. In this way, a robust, phenomenological modelling of cracking, and its effects, in reinforced concrete can be done at relatively low computational effort. Additional dissipative phenomena, like bond-slip effects in the rebar/concrete interface and the dowel action, are also accounted in a simple manner. Applications to practical cases in 2D [5] and 3D structures are presented to assess the feasibility of the proposed approach.