IDENTIFICATION OF SHEAR CRACKS IN REINFORCED BEAMS USING FINITE ELEMENT METHOD (ANSYS)

Abstract

Analytical determination of displacements and stresses in reinforced concrete material was difficult task and engineers had to rely on empirical formulas because concrete consists of heterogeneous material and creep and shrinkage influenced deformations in it. Due to these complexities engineers in past had been facing difficulties in coping such problems, but with the advancement of digital computerization and modern numerical methods for analysis such as finite element method, these problems can be addressed in a very efficient way. There were two ways to carry out modeling in ANSYS software, one was smeared approach and the other one was discrete. In the past, Smeared approach was used to identify the cracks in RC beam using ANSYS but in this work it was extended using discrete approach of modeling and shear cracks were identified in RC beam and load deflection curve was simulated which showed good agreement with the experimental results.