General Approach for Concrete Modeling: Impact on Reinforced Concrete

In the world of Numerical Simulation, concrete modeling is one of the most complicated aspect engineers have to carry out. In fact, damage and failure occurring during concrete deformation are very complex processes difficult to reproduce with material models. And to make matters worse, material information available for concrete is often much reduced, leaving engineers profess structure performance without sufficient data. ®LS-DYNA has several material laws to model concrete behavior, and other modeling choices like hourglass treatment and boundary conditions are crucial. All these possibilities lead to a problem of “engineering dependence” for simulation results. This paper offers a general modeling approach for concrete modeling, where the main goal is to try to understand the ins and outs of different modeling to be able to have an overall view of a problem. This general modeling approach will be showed with the example of an impact on a reinforced concrete structure, setting up DoE study investigating material models, Boundary Conditions ®and Hourglass aspects, and using LS-OPT to perform Sensitivity Analysis and Optimizations assessing concrete behavior.