In this paper, a new method to calculate the directions and weights in microplane constitutive model was proposed. The surface of a unit cube was divided into regular rectangle grids, and then microplanes were generated by mapping those grids onto…
In this paper, a new method to calculate the directions and weights in microplane constitutive model was proposed. The surface of a unit cube was divided into regular rectangle grids, and then microplanes were generated by mapping those grids onto a unit spherical surface, of which each microplane was a spherical quadrilateral. The directional vector of a microplane will be determined by the central point of the related rectangle on the cubic surface, and the functions for calculating the microplane weight were derived by means of spherical geometry theory. A non-uniform indicator to analyze the non-uniformity of the distributed microplanes was established. It was shown that the distribution of the microplanes was non-uniform when the surface of cube was meshed uniformly. However the non-uniformity of the distributed microplanes would be improved greatly when the grids of cube surface were configured properly.