A displacement based approach for the analysis, development, and design of reinforced concrete

Prior to cracking, reinforced concrete (RC) has full‐interaction (FI) behavior, that is there is negligible slip between adjacent elements. After cracking, the regions in the vicinity of a crack exhibit partial‐interaction (PI), that is relative slip between elements occurs. RC development has in the past relied heavily on FI strain based approaches and, consequently, they are in general not able to directly simulate the PI behavior associated with RC. Because of this deficiency in simulation, safe design rules have had to be developed either empirically or semi‐empirically using a vast amount of member level testing to calibrate correction factors which are applied to virtually all aspects of RC design. As a result of this reliance on experimental calibration, the application of these empirical rules is limited by the range of testing that has been undertaken and this creates a feedback loop necessitating the further testing of large scale elements. In this paper, it is shown that a displacement based approach, that is a PI approach, can directly simulate through mechanics the RC PI behaviors and, hence, significantly reduces the need for member testing required to develop design rules. It is shown how only material testing is required in order to quantify the member behavior which, consequently, should both reduce the cost of development and expedite the development of safe design rules for a particular type of fiber concrete.