AN APPROACH OF NONLINEAR FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF REINFORCED CONCRETE BEAM

A beam element with a meshed section based on distributed plasticity and flexibility theory is presented for the material nonlinear finite element analysis of a reinforced-concrete framed structure, the sections of a concrete beam element are discretized into the plane isotropic components in this formulation, the stress distribution on the sections is described with the stresses at quadrature points in the mesh, the stiffness matrices of the sections are calculated by integration of the stress-strain relations of the material on the meshes and the contribution of the stiffness by reinforcing steel is also counted, the flexibility matrix of the element is formed by integration of section flexibility matrices with force-interpolation functions, and then it is inverted to obtain the element stiffness matrix. Finally, a numerical example of the ultimate load capacity analysis of a reinforced concrete beam illustrates the accuracy of the formulation.