Characterization of cracks of damaged concrete structures in dynamics

Abstract

The analysis and prediction of the degradation process and cracking of concrete structures with numerical models is an important issue in the field of civil engineering. In order to describe the global behavior of a structure composed of quasi-brittle material as well as local fields, a continuous approach using nonlinear constitutive law (e.g. damage, plasticity,. . .) remains the most efficient one regarding the computational time. However, one has to consider additional tools to extract discrete information about cracks like spacing and openings from these computations. The objective of this research is to propose tools capable of extracting local information such as cracking using two post-treatment methods of a global finite element analysis. These methods are applied to a dynamic one-point bend test case and results show the capability of both methods to give a good estimation of crack path and openings.