Advanced Computationally Efficient Modeling of RC Structures Nolinear Cyclic Behavior

Under severe seismic excitation, structural behavior of buildings and other constructions is highly complex. It involves, among other issues, soil-structure interaction, large strains and displacements, damage, plasticity, and near-collapse behavior. Moreover, in reinforced concrete structures, there are several coupled degradation and failure modes: cracking, crushing and spalling of concrete, yielding and pull-out of tensioned reinforcement, yielding and buckling of compressed reinforcement.

Furthermore, another circumstance makes the situation more alarming: given the increasing awareness and concern on the huge worldwide seismic risk, earthquake engineering has experienced in last years substantial advances. New design and analysis strategies have been proposed, leading to relevant developments. These developments rely on extensive testing and numerical simulation mainly based on oversimplified models referred in this work as structural component-based models, as a result of their moderate computational cost. Therefore, there is a strong need of verifying the reliability of the new developments by comparison with analyses performed using more advanced simulation tools and with experiments. This work is organized in two parts. First part presents an accurate model, while the second part deals with a more simplified model, although highly computational efficient.