Concrete structures under severe loading: A strategy to model the response for a large range of dynamic loads

Realistic dynamic description and modelling of material failure is one of the actual problems in structural mechanics. Analyses of failure processes require the use of complex FE analyses and advanced constitutive models. For modeling of concrete it is necessary to capture several important phenomena such as damage and ductility (possibly softening), rate effects ... This implies the description of the concrete behaviour with constitutive equations as refined as possible. In this work a coupled damage and plasticity model including the effective stress concept is used to solve time dependent problems. This is done using an explicit procedure contributing to a reduction of the computational time. Such a procedure requires no iterations and no tangent stiffness matrix. Stability is automatically assured by using small time increments. This strategy has been successfully applied during the last years to model a large range of severe loadings on complex reinforced concrete structures. The mean model concepts are presented in this paper and some examples of numerical simulations are given and compared to experimental data.