Reinforced concrete plates: cracking and ultimate load through Lumped Damage Mechanics

Resumo

In structural analysis, it is crucial to accurately characterize the nonlinear behavior of structures. This behavior may result on strain localization phenomena, that may lead to collapse processes. Lumped Damage Mechanics (LDM), one of the more recent nonlinear theories, has shown promise for a variety of applications. It is applied to frame elements, for static and dynamic analysis, in reinforced concrete, plain concrete or steel structures, or in continuous media, with plate elements for plain concrete or bending plate elements, for reinforced concrete slabs. This paper presents the study of reinforced concrete slabs using LDM. Damage and plastic rotations are the internal variables of the problem that characterize concrete cracking and reinforcement yielding, respectively. The results numerically obtained were confronted with experimental ones. It was observed that the model is highly accurate in describing the initiation and propagation of cracks, as well as identifying the collapse mechanism, in addition to precise Load vs. Deflection results, close to the experimental values.