Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa, Portugal 2Koiter Institute Delft I Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands In this paper embedded strong discontinuities are used to model discrete cracking in materials like concrete. In the approach followed a discontinuous displacement field…
Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa, Portugal 2Koiter Institute Delft I Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands In this paper embedded strong discontinuities are used to model discrete cracking in materials like concrete. In the approach followed a discontinuous displacement field is considered and the deformation is localized at a surface of zero width. Both a damage law and a plasticity law are adopted to describe the constitutive relation between tractions and displacement jumps at the discontinuity surface. An algorithm is introduced to enforce the continuity of the crack path, permitting a clear identification of the discontinuities in the mesh. Both mode I and mixed mode cracldng have been considered and the importance of the shear tractions on the global behaviour of a structure is assessed. With the formulation adopted it is concluded that: i) realistic crack patterns are obtained, similar to those found in experiments and ii) the dissipation of energy can be objectively found irrespective of the mesh that is used. INTRODUCTION both approximations have been successful in repro- ducing the localized softening behaviour of quasi- The finite element method has been used in the past to brittle materials like concrete, numerical difficulties simulate strain-softening in the continuum.