DAMAGE MODEL BASED NUMERICAL STUDY FOR SHEAR FAILURES OF REINFORCED CONCRETE BEAMS

As an important failure pattern, the shear failure of reinforced concrete members still cannot be well captured by the current theory and methods. In the present work, the shear failure of a reinforced concrete beam is numerically investigated based on a damage constitutive model for concrete and on the explicit nonlinear finite element method. Besides, the aspects of the numerical result and the test result of a beam in shear are compared and discussed, including crack developing and load-deformation response. The results indicate that the proposed method could reproduce the salient feature of shear failure, and the crack patterns could be well tracked. The proposed method offers an alternate way to investigate the shear failure for reinforced concrete members.