Plastic-damage model for concrete in principal directions

TL;DR

This paper introduces a plastic-damage model for concrete that operates in principal stress directions, enabling more accurate simulation of damage and plasticity in orthotropic materials.

Contribution

It formulates a damage model based on principal stress directions, simplifying the numerical implementation and improving the representation of concrete behavior.

Findings

Model effectively captures concrete damage in principal directions

Numerical implementation is efficient and robust

Demonstrated on an illustrative example

Abstract

In the present paper a plastic-damage model for concrete is discussed. Based on the fact that for isotropic materials the elastic trial stress and the projected plastic stress states have the same eigenvec-tors, the loading surface is formulated in the principal stress space rather than using the invariants of stress tensor. The model assumes that the directions of orthotropic damage coincide with principal directions of elastic predictor stress state (motivated by coaxial rotated crack model). Due to this assumption, the load-ing surface and the closest point projection algorithm can still be formulated in the principal directions. The evolution of the inelastic strain is determined using minimization principle. Damage and plastic parts of the inelastic strain are separated using a scalar parameter, which is assumed to be stress dependent. The paper also discusses an effective numerical implementation. The performance of the model is demonstrated on one illustrative example.