In engineering practice, the durability of concrete structures is usually, as in European standard (EC2) dealt with crack opening and spacing in order to limit the corrosion risk for rebars due to the penetration of chemical agents coming from the…
In engineering practice, the durability of concrete structures is usually, as in European standard (EC2) dealt with crack opening and spacing in order to limit the corrosion risk for rebars due to the penetration of chemical agents coming from the environment of the structure. The advanced numerical modelling of cracking in reinforced concrete structures may be dealt with either by means of discontinuous models (fracture mechanics, X-FEM, G-FEM, etc.) or using con- tinuous constitutive models such as damage mechanics. The issue of this contribution is to propose a procedure to get crack path and its opening along the path. The method is based on a topological search of the crack path following the ridge formed by the equivalent strain field in a 2D plane. 3D crack surfaces can be assessed by slicing the computational domainin2Dplanes. Alongthis surface, at discrete points the crack opening equivalent to the strong discontinuity approach can be computed. This procedure has already been applied in a 2D context and validated against experimental results obtained by digital image correlation for a 3 point bending beam. More recently, the representation of the strain field has been largely improved by introducing the effect of the stress field into the space averaging procedure of the nonlocal integral approach. The consequence is a more accurate estimation of the crack opening since the strain field is closer to the one obtained by discrete approach, in contrary to the original version of the nonlocal approach. The complete procedure is applied to a full size reinforced concrete beam submitted to a four point bending test. The influence of the rebar diameter and the concrete cover are analysed on the crack pattern and the crack opening.