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(Hakozaki 6-10-1, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka 812-8581, Japan)Computer modelings are one of the most suitable and promising approaches for comprehensively understanding the mechanisms of failure in concrete. This paper presents a practical, computationally efficient procedure for analyzing fracture of reinforced concrete structures. Concrete material is represented by a rigid-body-spring model with random geometry. Rather than averaging the effects of reinforcing over a regional material volume, reinforcing material is explicitly modeled using a beam-and linkage-spring. The spring network gives reasonable predictions of fracture behavior in reinforced concrete structures.Numerical predictions are compared with experimental results of reinforced concrete piers and beams.

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If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. IntroductionCement-based composites exhibit random structure over several length scales of observation. An understanding of how actions at different length scales interrelate is important for engineering high-performance cement-based materials.Computational modeling complements physical experimentation in that it offers a precisely controlled environment for studying material behavior. A majority of the fracture models for concrete are formulated at the continuum level. That is, macroscopic notions of stress and strain are used to describe material response during damage evolution. In recent years, there has been great interest in simulating the micro-and meso-behavior of fracture in these materials (Bazant et al., 1990;Roelfstra, 1989;Schlangen, 1993;Schlangen and van Mier, 1992). The prefix meso, as used in this article, indicates that the three basic components (i.e. matrix, inclusions, and to some degree the matrixinclusion interface) are discretely modeled by the computational approach.Lattice, or spring network, models originate from the field of theoretical physics and have been applied to studying fracture in a variety of materials (Herrmann and Roux, 1990). Material continua are discretized using either regular or random networks of simple mechanical elements, such as centralforce springs, springs with axial and shear components, or beams with axial, shear, and flexural components. The application of regular lattice models to simulating fracture in cement composites began with Schlangen and van Mier (1992) and has evolved in more recent works (Arslan et al., 1995;Schlangen, 1993;Schlangen and Garboczi, 1996;Vervuurt et al., 1995). Beam elements are attractive since they capture rotational effects local to concrete fracture and show less bias on fracture direction in regular lattices (Schlangen and Garboczi, 1996). A regular lattice of beam elements is a discretization of a Cosserat continuum, which has the ability to limit localization during fracture which activates its rotational degrees of freedom, such as shear banding (de Borst and Mühlhaus, 1991).