Nonlinear dynamic analysis of reinforced concrete buildings

Summary

The goal of this project is the development of tools for nonlinear dynamic analysis of three-dimensional reinforced concrete structures. The comparison with simplyfied methods used in the practice of civil engineering shows their limitations.

An extensive evaluation of existing programs with threedimensional and dynamic capabilities showed that none of these programs is able to model the hysteretic behaviour of plastic regions, which develop in reinforced structures under earthquake excitations. Instead of performing an integral new software development, the existing finite elemente program ABAQUS was enhanced in order to fill the above mentioned gap with minimum effort.

New macro elements are developed to model large regions of the structure and to investigate the global structural behaviour. New constitutive relations enable more detailed considerations of the local behaviour. They represent the behaviour in the integration points of ABAQUS libary elements. The reliability of the new macro elements and constitutive relations (ABAQUS/QUAKE) are checked by comparison with cyclic static and dynamic experimental results.

Staff

Prof. Dr. Hugo Bachmann (Guideance)
Dr. Thomas Wenk
Dr. Martin Neujahr
Dr. Peter Linde

Support

Stiftung des Vereins Schweizerischer Zement-, Kalk- und Gips-Fabrikanten VSZKGF, Zürich (Foundation of Swiss Cement Manufacturers)
Kommission für Technologie und Innovation KTI, Bern (Commission for Technology and Innovation)