Abaqus provides the following approaches for studying crack initiation. See “Specifying a contact interaction property for XFEM,” Section 31.3.6.
Reinforcement Reinforcement in concrete structures is typically provided by means of rebars. Rebars are one-dimensional strain theory elements (rods) that can be defined singly or embedded in oriented surfaces. Rebars are discussed in. They are typically used with elastic-plastic material behavior and are superposed on a mesh of standard element types used to model the plain concrete. With this modeling approach, the concrete cracking behavior is considered independently of the rebar. .jpg)
Effects associated with the rebar/concrete interface, such as bond slip and dowel action, are modeled approximately by introducing some “tension stiffening” into the concrete cracking model to simulate load transfer across cracks through the rebar. Cracking Abaqus/Explicit uses a smeared crack model to represent the discontinuous brittle behavior in concrete. It does not track individual “macro” cracks: instead, constitutive calculations are performed independently at each material point of the finite element model. The presence of cracks enters into these calculations by the way in which the cracks affect the stress and material stiffness associated with the material point. For simplicity of discussion in this section, the term “crack” is used to mean a direction in which cracking has been detected at the single material calculation point in question: the closest physical concept is that there exists a continuum of micro-cracks in the neighborhood of the point, oriented as determined by the model. The anisotropy introduced by cracking is assumed to be important in the simulations for which the model is intended.
Crack directions The Abaqus/Explicit cracking model assumes fixed, orthogonal cracks, with the maximum number of cracks at a material point limited by the number of direct stress components present at that material point of the finite element model (a maximum of three cracks in three-dimensional, plane strain, and axisymmetric problems; two cracks in plane stress and shell problems; and one crack in beam or truss problems). Internally, once cracks exist at a point, the component forms of all vector- and tensor-valued quantities are rotated so that they lie in the local system defined by the crack orientation vectors (the normals to the crack faces). The model ensures that these crack face normal vectors will be orthogonal, so that this local crack system is rectangular Cartesian.
Programma dlya kaljkulyacii na izgotovlenie metallicheskih izdelij. For output purposes you are offered results of stresses and strains in the global and/or local crack systems. Crack detection A simple Rankine criterion is used to detect crack initiation.
This criterion states that a crack forms when the maximum principal tensile stress exceeds the tensile strength of the brittle material. Although crack detection is based purely on Mode I fracture considerations, ensuing cracked behavior includes both Mode I (tension softening/stiffening) and Mode II (shear softening/retention) behavior, as described later. As soon as the Rankine criterion for crack formation has been met, we assume that a first crack has formed. The crack surface is taken to be normal to the direction of the maximum tensile principal stress.
Subsequent cracks may form with crack surface normals in the direction of maximum principal tensile stress that is orthogonal to the directions of any existing crack surface normals at the same point. Cracking is irrecoverable in the sense that, once a crack has occurred at a point, it remains throughout the rest of the calculation. However, crack closing and reopening may take place along the directions of the crack surface normals. The model neglects any permanent strain associated with cracking; that is, it is assumed that the cracks can close completely when the stress across them becomes compressive. In practical calculations for reinforced concrete, the mesh is usually such that each element contains rebars.
In this case the interaction between the rebars and the concrete tends to mitigate this effect, provided that a reasonable amount of “tension stiffening” is introduced in the cracking model to simulate this interaction. This requires an estimate of the tension stiffening effect, which depends on factors such as the density of reinforcement, the quality of the bond between the rebar and the concrete, the relative size of the concrete aggregate compared to the rebar diameter, and the mesh. A reasonable starting point for relatively heavily reinforced concrete modeled with a fairly detailed mesh is to assume that the strain softening after failure reduces the stress linearly to zero at a total strain about ten times the strain at failure. Since the strain at failure in standard concretes is typically 10 –4, this suggests that tension stiffening that reduces the stress to zero at a total strain of about 10 –3 is reasonable. This parameter should be calibrated to each particular case. In static applications too little tension stiffening will cause the local cracking failure in the concrete to introduce temporarily unstable behavior in the overall response of the model. Few practical designs exhibit such behavior, so that the presence of this type of response in the analysis model usually indicates that the tension stiffening is unreasonably low.