Reinforced concrete (RC) has become one of the most important building materials

and is widely used in many types of engineering structures. The economy, the
efficiency, the strength and the stiffness of reinforced concrete make it an attractive
material for a wide range of structural applications. For its use as structural
material, concrete must satisfy the following conditions:
(1) The structure must be strong and safe. The proper application of the
fundamental principles of analysis, the laws of
equilibrium and the consideration of the mechanical properties of the component
materials should result in a sufficient margin of safety against collapse under
accidental overloads.

(2) The structure must be stiff and appear unblemished. Care must be taken to
control deflections under service loads and to limit the crack width to an acceptable
level.

(3) The structure must be economical. Materials must be used efficiently, since the
difference in unit cost between concrete and steel is relatively large.

The ultimate objective of design is the creation of a safe and economical

structure. Advanced analytical tools can be an indispensable aid in the
assessment of the safety and the serviceability of a proposed design. This is,
especially, true for many complex modern structures such as nuclear power plants,
bridges, off-shore platforms for oil and gas exploration and underground or
underwater tunnels, which are subjected to very complex load histories. The safety
and serviceability assessment of these structures necessitates the development of
accurate and reliable methods and models for their analysis. In addition, the rise in
cost of structures encourages engineers to seek more economical alternative
designs often resorting to innovative construction methods without lowering the
safety of the structure. Intimately related to the increase in scale of modern
structures is the extent and impact of disaster in terms of human and economical
loss in the event of structural failure. As a result, careful and detailed structural
safety analysis becomes more and more necessary. The objective of such an
analysis is the investigation of the behavior of the structure under all possible
loading conditions, both, monotonic and cyclic, its time-dependent behavior, and,
especially, its behavior under overloading.

The development of analytical models of the response of RC structures is

complicated by the following factors:

 Reinforced concrete is a composite material made up of concrete and steel, two

materials with very different physical and mechanical behavior;
Concrete exhibits nonlinear behavior even under low level loading due to
nonlinear material behavior, environmental effects, cracking, biaxial stiffening and
strain softening;
Reinforcing steel and concrete interact in a complex way through bond-slip and
aggregate interlock.
These complex phenomena have led engineers in the past to rely heavily on
empirical formulas for the design of concrete structures, which were derived from
numerous experiments. With the advent of digital computers and powerful methods
of analysis, such as the finite element method, many efforts to develop analytical
solutions which would obviate the need for experiments have been undertaken by
investigators. The finite element method has thus become a powerful computational
tool, which allows complex analyses of the nonlinear response of RC structures to be
carried out in a routine fashion. With this method the importance and interaction of
different nonlinear effects on the response of RC structures can be studied
analytically. The present study is part of this continuing effort and concerns the
analysis of reinforced concrete beams, slabs, and beam-to-column sub assemblages
under monotonic loads. A follow-up study will address the response of these
structures under cyclic load reversals.

2.1 GENERAL

II MATERIAL MODELING

Reinforced concrete structures are made up of two materials with different

characteristics, namely, concrete and steel. Steel can be considered a
homogeneous material and its material properties are generally well defined.
Concrete is, on the other hand, a heterogeneous material made up of cement,
mortar and aggregates. Its mechanical properties scatter more widely and cannot
be defined easily. For the convenience of analysis and design, however, concrete is
often considered a homogeneous material in the macroscopic sense

FIGURE] TYPICAL LOAD-DISPLACEMENT RESPONSE OF RC ELEMENT

The typical stages in the load-deformation behavior of a reinforced concrete simply

supported beam are illustrated in Figure 1. Similar relations are obtained for other
types of reinforced concrete structural elements. This highly nonlinear response can
be roughly divided into three ranges of behavior: the uncracked elastic stage, the
crack propagation and the plastic (yielding or crushing) stage. The nonlinear
response is caused by two major effects, namely, cracking of concrete in tension,
and yielding of the reinforcement or crushing of concrete in compression.
Nonlinearities also arise from the interaction of the constituents of reinforced
concrete, such as bond-slip between reinforcing steel and surrounding concrete,
aggregate interlock at a crack and dowel action of the reinforcing steel crossing a
crack. The time-dependent effects of creep, shrinkage and temperature variation
also contribute to the nonlinear behavior. Furthermore, the stress-strain relation of
concrete is not only nonlinear, but is different in tension than in compression and
the mechanical properties are dependent on concrete age at loading and on
environmental conditions, such as ambient temperature and humidity. The material
properties of concrete and steel are also strain-rate dependent to a different extent.

The assumptions made in the description of material behavior are summarized

below:
The stiffness of concrete and reinforcing steel is formulated separately. The results
are then superimposed to obtain the element
stiffness;

 The smeared crack model is adopted in the description of the behavior of cracked
concrete;
Cracking in more than one direction is represented by a system of orthogonal
cracks;
The crack direction changes with load history (rotating crack model);
The reinforcing steel is assumed to carry stress along its axis only and the effect
of dowel action of reinforcement is neglected; The transfer of stresses between
reinforcing steel and concrete and the resulting bond slip is explicitly accounted for
in a new discrete reinforcing steel model, which is embedded in the concrete
element.