RC-INSANE – an interactive environment for nonlinear analysis of reinforced concrete structures

Abstract

The development of numerical and computational resources that can present reliable models for the analysis of reinforced concrete structures is mainly driven by its widespread use. Considering that reinforced concrete is a composite material and bond is the load-carrying mechanism, these models must consider that the structural behavior is affected by the interaction between concrete and reinforcement. On this basis, the Finite Element Method (FEM) is a well-established method able to provide consistent results for reinforced concrete modeling through reinforcement and bond models. Nevertheless, to simplify the analysis, the hypothesis of strain compatibility between concrete and reinforcement is usually considered. Under certain loads and specific geometries, this hypothesis is not valid, and the bond-slip phenomenon must be considered to fully characterize the structural behavior. To fulfill this need, this paper presents a graphic interface that enables the modeling of reinforced concrete structures through discrete and embedded reinforcement models, with the possibility to include the bond-slip phenomenon based on several constitutive laws proposed in the literature. The computational implementations were held in the INSANE (INteractive Structural ANalysis Environment), an open-source software based on the Object-Oriented Programming paradigm, which enclosures several constitutive models for nonlinear concrete modeling and different numerical techniques, and a post-processing application able to represent the results by way of a friendly-user graphic interface.