Concrete Damaged Plasticity

The concrete damaged plasticity material behavior enables you to model concrete and other quasi-brittle materials in beams, trusses, shells, and solids. You can define this material behavior by specifying a yield behavior and two separate hardening mechanisms (tension stiffening and compression hardening). The model also supports two optional damage behaviors and a failure mechanism. Concrete failure is active during explicit simulations only.

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Concrete Damaged Plasticity

The concrete damaged plasticity material model is a continuum, plasticity-based, damage model for concrete. It assumes that the main two failure mechanisms are tensile cracking and compressive crushing of the concrete material. Two hardening variables control the evolution of the yield (or failure) surface: tensile equivalent plastic strain ( ε ˜ t p l ) and compressive equivalent plastic strain ( ε ˜ c p l ). These variables are linked to failure mechanisms under tension and compression loading, respectively.

The concrete damaged plasticity material option:

  • can be used for plain concrete, even though it is intended primarily for the analysis of reinforced concrete structures;
  • can be used with rebar to model concrete reinforcement;
  • is designed for applications in which concrete is subjected to monotonic, cyclic, and/or dynamic loading under low confining pressures;
  • consists of the combination of nonassociated multi-hardening plasticity and scalar (isotropic) damaged elasticity to describe the irreversible damage that occurs during the fracturing process;
  • allows user control of stiffness recovery effects during cyclic load reversals;
  • allows removal of elements based on material failure criteria;
  • can be defined to be sensitive to the rate of straining;
  • can be used in conjunction with a viscoplastic regularization of the constitutive equations in Abaqus/Standard to improve the convergence rate in the softening regime, and;
  • requires that the elastic behavior of the material be isotropic and linear.

The following parameters define flow potential, yield surface, and viscosity parameters for the concrete damaged plasticity material model.

Input Data Description
Dilation Angle Dilation angle measure, ψ , in the p-q plane at high confining pressure.
Flow Potential Eccentricity Eccentricity, ϵ , which is a small positive number that defines the rate at which the hyperbolic flow potential approaches its asymptote.
Ratio of Yield Stresses Ratio of initial equibiaxial compressive yield stress to initial uniaxial compressive yield stress, σ b 0 σ c 0 .
Ratio of Stress Invariants K c , ratio of the second stress invariant on the tensile meridian to that on the compressive meridian at initial yield for any given value of the pressure invariant, p , such that the maximum principal stress is negative. It must satisfy the condition 0.5 < K c 1.0 .
Viscosity Visco-plastic regularization parameter, μ , of the concrete constitutive equations used in implicit integration schemes. Ignored for explicit integration.
Use temperature-dependent data Specifies material parameters that depend on temperature. A Temperature field appears in the data table. For more information, see Specifying Material Data as a Function of Temperature and Independent Field Variables.
Number of field variables Specifies material parameters that depend on one or more independent field variables. A Field column appears in the data table. For more information, see Specifying Material Data as a Function of Temperature and Independent Field Variables.