Cracking analysis of reinforced concrete structures

International audienceThe study of a reinforced concrete beam tested under four-point bending is proposed in this article. An analysis of the behaviour of this beam from the global response down to local information such as cracking is performed. In order to describe the progressive degradation of the beam, a damage model is used, associated to a stress-based non-local regularisation method. A post-treatment of the finite element analysis is then performed to characterise the cracking pattern (crack spacing and crack opening). In this article, two different methods of post-treatment are compared: the topological search and continuous/discontinuous crack opening and the global/local analysis. Results show the capability of both methods to give a good estimation of cracking. Finally, the main advantages and drawbacks of both methods are underlined