A combined experimental and numerical analysis on the seismic behavior of short reinforced concrete columns with different structural sizes and axial compression ratios

Abstract

The results of an experimental program on eight short reinforced concrete columns having different structural sizes and axial compression ratios subjected to monotonic/cyclic lateral loading were reported. A 3D mesoscopic simulation method for the analysis of mechanical properties of reinforced concrete members was established, and then it was utilized as an important supplement and extension of the traditional experimental method. Lots of numerical trials, based on the restricted experimental results and the proposed 3D mesoscopic simulation method, were carried out to sufficiently evaluate the seismic performances of short reinforced concrete columns with different structural sizes and axial compression ratios. The test results indicate that (1) the failure pattern of reinforced concrete columns can be significantly affected by the shear-span ratio; (2) increasing the axial compression ratio could improve the load capacity of the reinforced concrete column, but the deformation capacity would be restricted and the failure mode would be more brittle, consequently the energy dissipation capacity could be deteriorated; and (3) the load capacity, the displacement ductility, and the energy dissipation capacity of the short reinforced concrete columns all exhibit clear size effect, namely, the size effect could significantly affect the seismic behavior of reinforced concrete columns.

Experimental investigation of full-scale concrete columns confined by high-strength transverse reinforcement subjected to lateral cyclic loading

“…On the one hand, in engineering projects, the side lengths of square columns are usually no less than 400 mm. On the other hand, Liu studied the size effect of seismic performance of RC columns and found that the deformability of RC columns decreased with the increase in size of RC columns [20]. Thus, studies about the seismic behaivour of confined concrete with side length no less than 400 mm are necessary.…”

XFEM-Based Multiscale Simulation on Monotonic and Hysteretic Behavior of Reinforced-Concrete Columns

“…Meanwhile, various kinds of two-scale modeling methods have been successfully applied in the damage and failure analysis of civil structures under earthquakes [16][17][18][19][20]. Moreover, the mesoscale modeling approach has been successfully applied in the numerical simulation of concrete structures subjected to various loading cases [21][22][23]. The feasibility of XFEM-based multiscale models composed of two-scale and mesoscale models needs to be further investigated to provide an efficient way to analyze the structural behavior of RC structures.…”

Modeling the hysteretic responses of RC shear walls under cyclic loading by an energy-based plastic-damage model for concrete

“…Similar work includes Feng et al (2018) and Palermo and Trombetti (2016). Note that damage mechanics have also been widely applied to the modeling of concrete materials under static (Chen et al, 2018;Jin et al, 2018a;Li and Wu, 2018;Suchorzewski et al, 2018;Vorobiev et al, 2018), fatigue (Ding and Li, 2018), and dynamic (Hu et al, 2018;Jin et al, 2018bJin et al, , 2018cYang et al, 2019) loadings as well as harsh environments (Dong et al, 2018;Luo et al, 2018). The remainder of the paper is structured as follows.…”