Numerical Fracture analysis of prestressed concrete beams

Fracture of prestressed concrete beams is studied with a novel and robust three-dimensional meshfree method. The meshfree method describes the crack as a set of cohesive crack segments and avoids the representation of the crack surface. It is ideally suited for a large number of cracks. The crack is modeled by splitting particles into two particles on opposite sides of the crack segment and the shape functions of neighboring particles are modified in a way the discontinuous displacement field is captured appropriately. A simple, robust and efficient way to determine, on which side adjacent particles of the corresponding crack segment lies, is proposed. We will show that the method does not show any "mesh" orientation bias and captures complicated failure patterns of experimental data well.