NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF RC FRAME TESTING WITH DAMAGED PLASTICITY MODEL. COMPARISON WITH SIMPLIFIED MODELS

F. LÓPEZ-ALMANSA; B. ALFARAH; S. OLLER

Conferencia; Second European Conference nn Earthquake Engineering and Seismology; 2014

The seismic structural behaviour of buildings and other constructions is highly complex, involving, among other issues, complex dynamic interactions with the input ground motion, large strains and displacements, damage, plasticity and near-collapse behaviour. In reinforced concrete structures, there are several structural degradation modes at the structural components level: cracking, crushing and spalling of concrete, yielding and pull-out of the tensioned reinforcement, and yielding and buckling of the compressed reinforcement.The global seismic risk is both important and fast growing; therefore, an important research effort is being conducted worldwide to provide efficient analysis and design tools. Among them, the Incremental Dynamic Analysis (IDA) is one of the most efficient yet high costly strategies. These instruments rely on extensive testing and numerical simulation. Despite the aforementioned complexity of the seismic structural behaviour, most of the numerical analyses are mainly carried out using simplified models; such models exhibit two major limitations: not all the deterioration and collapse modes are considered, and the energy balance is not guaranteed. Therefore, there is a strong need of verifying the accuracy and reliability of the obtained conclusions by comparison with more complex numerical models. The objective of this research is to investigate the capacity of the simplified models that are commonly used in earthquake engineering to reproduce adequately the nonlinear dynamicbehaviour of structures undergoing severe seismic excitation; this objective is accomplished by comparison with advanced continuum mechanics-based models.The nonlinear behaviour of the RC frame is described with three types of models; they differ in the simulation of the plasticity, the consideration of the behaviour of the frame elements and the type of finite elements used to discretize the structural components. Next three paragraphs explain each of the considered types of models.