Continuous Damage Models for Fracture of Concrete

International audienceOver the past years, damage mechanics has become a more and more popular tool for describing concrete fracture. The objective of this paper is to provide a review of the research performed by the authors in this field. Several simple scalar damage models, aimed at modelling mode I cracking in concrete, are examined first. Their connection with smeared crack models and discrete analyses of failure in brittle disordered media is discussed. Several enhancements of the initial isotropic formulation are also reviewed. The paper concludes with the extension to non local damage, in an integral or gradient format and to its ability to capture structural size effects