Calibrating a New Constitutive Tension Model to Extract a Simplified Nonlinear Sectional Analysis of Reinforced Concrete Beams

Nonlinear analysis of structural members is vital to understand the behavior and the response of reinforced concrete members. Even though most design procedures concentrate on the ultimate stage of response towards the end of the post-yielding zone as the decisive design criterion, the structural members usually function at the service load levels within the post-cracking zone. Therefore, cracking is a critical aspect of concrete behavior that affects the overall response of reinforced concrete beams. The initiation and the propagation of the cracks are affected directly by the tension and shear stresses in the beam. In flexural beams, the tensile stresses dominate the crack onset and its growth. Cracks in reinforced concrete flexural beams leave non-cracked regions in between the cracked sections. In order to apply a consistent analysis strategy, the smeared crack approach averages the behavior of these different cracked sections and uncracked in between regions to generate an accurate global response of the entire beam. This study presents a numerical constitutive tensile model that captures the complete tensile response of the reinforced concrete flexural member, in terms of averaged/smeared crack response. As a second step, this model was examined against a large pool of experimental data to validate its accuracy. Overall, the main objective of this study is to develop a representative constitutive tensile model for reinforced concrete flexural members and validate its accuracy against experimental results. The full nonlinear sectional response is analytically realized, based on the assumed trilinear moment–curvature response and the assumed trilinear moment–extreme fiber compressive strain response. This is considered as the secondary outcome of the present study.