Experimental Validation of Smeared Analysis for Plain Concrete in Torsion

Abstract

This is the second of two papers concerned with the development and the application of a smeared crack model for the description of the behavior of concrete elements in torsion. The first paper presented the development of an efficient model for the torsional analysis of concrete that utilizes a special numerical technique, which is properly adapted to include the smeared crack approach. This paper presents the validation of the analytical model by providing comparisons between analytically predicted behavior curves and experimentally obtained ones. The experimental data used in this paper comprise a series of tests in pure torsion conducted for this purpose and a database of experimental information compiled from works around the world, in an attempt to establish the validity of the proposed approach based on a broad range of parametric studies. From the comparisons between the predicted and the measured data, it is concluded that the proposed approach describes very well the behavior of concrete element...