Abstract

Cracking is a major deterioration mechanism when considering the durability and service life of concrete. Fracture in reinforced concrete is complicated because it involves diverse phenomena such as the formation of cracks, crack propagation, crack bridging, the existence of micro-cracks, interactions between the reinforcement and the concrete, and the concrete microstructure. During the last decades various models were developed to simulate the cracking process of reinforced concrete beams. These models can broadly be classified as plasticity based models which are justified in the case of ductile behaviour e.g. beams with enough shear links and fracture mechanics based models which do not treat fracture as a point phenomenon but try explaining the crack propagation. In our research we are trying to identify the transitional criteria between the two perspectives and generalize the modelling of the cracking process to include the different cases of reinforced concrete. In the seminar, I am going to outline different cracking models and comparing the theoretical predictions with some of the experimental results on reinforced concrete cracking