An element incorporating cracking for reinforced concrete skeletal structures at service load

Abstract

An element has been proposed to take into account cracking in the reinforced concrete skeletal structures subjected to a service load. A typical skeletal member is modeled as a single element and is visualized to consist of at most five zones (cracked or uncracked). Closed-form expressions for the flexibility and stiffness coefficients and end displacements have been obtained. Furthermore, for use in everyday design, a hybrid analytical–numerical procedure has been developed using the proposed element. The procedure is analytical at the element level and numerical at the structural level. To keep the procedure analytical at the element level, the average tension stiffening characteristics are arrived at for the cracked zones. The developed procedure has been validated in limiting cases by comparison with the experimental results reported elsewhere and by comparison with the finite element method results. The proposed element would lead to a drastic reduction in computational time for large reinforced concrete structures, for example, tall reinforced concrete building frames.