NLFEA of reinforced concrete shear walls under cyclic loading by means of PARC_CL2.0 crack model

A constitutive crack model, defined PARC_CL2.0 (Physical Approach for Reinforced Concrete under Cyclic Loading condition), for predicting the cyclic response of reinforced concrete (RC) structures is presented in this paper. The PARC_CL2.0 crack model, which is implemented in the user subroutine UMAT.for in Abaqus Code, is based on a smeared fixed crack approach and is applied to multi-layered shell and membrane elements modeling. The main purpose of such model is the realistic modeling of the hysteretic behavior of concrete and steel under reversed cyclic loading, obtained considering irrecoverable strains and nonlinear unloading curves whose represent the energy dissipation. The PARC_CL2.0 crack model is firstly validated using measured data from experimental tests on simple reinforced concrete panels subjected to reversed cyclic loading available in literature.