Development of Tensile Crack Model Considering Poisson’s Effect and Its Application to a Large-Scale Finite Element Analysis of an RC Structure

<p>In this paper, a tensile crack model for a concrete constitutive model is proposed. The method is applied to large-scale finite element (FE) analyses of reinforced concrete (RC) structures. For constitutive modeling of concrete material subjected to multidirectional cyclic loading, Poisson’s effect is considered in the proposed model. In addition, crack strain tensor is introduced as a set of inner variables so that the formulation can be concise and comprehensive. To confirm the basic behavior of the proposed model, computation of stress integration for the tensile crack model and FE analyses of cubic models were conducted. Then, to verify and validate the proposed model, static analyses of a bending failure test of an RC beam were conducted for various element sizes and loading increments. The analysis results indicates that small loading increment is essential to simulate dispersion of cracks and reproduce the load-displacement relationship of the experiment.</p><p>Finally, a seismic response analysis of the E-Defense shake table test of a 10-story RC building was conducted. Hysteresis loop had fairly good agreement with the experimental one. In the range where the story drift angle is small, however, inter-story stiffness of the analysis was overestimated, which may be because the degradation of tensile strength caused by the former tensile cracking is not considered in the present model.</p>