INFLUENCE OF CRACKING MODELS ON NUMERICAL ANALYSIS OF REINFORCED CONCRETE BEAM

Abstract

The concrete is an outstanding material with vast utilization in the civil construction area. The determination of nonlinear behavior of concrete is still a major challenge in structural engineering. In this study there were investigated three smeared cracking models used for numerical modeling of reinforced concrete beam: fixed, rotational and multidirectional. In order to validate the models, three experimental samples studied by Bresler & Scordelis (1963) and Ãlvares (1993) were selected and modeled using the software DIANA. The results indicated that the three adopted smeared crack models performed well and where capable of predicting the equilibrium path. However, to beams with shear rupture it was impossible to find acceptable solutions for the fixed model, whereas with the rotational model it was obtained major numerical instability in order to determine the equilibrium path after materializing the diagonal cracking. Keywords: reinforced concrete beams; smeared cracking models; finite element method.