Recently, efficient and very sophisticated numerical approaches have been developed in order to deal with crack propagation problems. They allow providing quantitative information related to crack opening and path. Although they are robust and rigorously formulated, their computational costs prevent…
Recently, efficient and very sophisticated numerical approaches have been developed in order to deal with crack propagation problems. They allow providing quantitative information related to crack opening and path. Although they are robust and rigorously formulated, their computational costs prevent to apply them on large scale structures. In this paper, authors are proposing simple and robust numerical process for obtaining quantitative information about cracks’ opening. A coupled discrete-continuous numerical analy- sis is presented and helps to provide such a quantitative description for a reinforced concrete structure sub- jected to external loading. The complete RC structure is studied through a macroscopic damage-based con- tinuous model. This level of computation helps to identify the critical parts of the structure where the density of cracks is the largest. Using this pre-calculated displacement field as boundary conditions, a discrete ele- ment approach is carried out. This provides the computation of the direction and the opening of the different cracks. A basic example highlights the relevancy of the proposed approach and encourages further works.