Defining concrete tension damage

You can define the uniaxial tension damage variable, dt, as a tabular function of either cracking strain or cracking displacement.For more information, see Defining Damage and Stiffness Recovery.

  1. Create a material model as described in Defining a concrete damaged plasticity model.”
  2. From the Suboptions menu in the Tensile Behavior tabbed page, select Tension Damage.

    A Suboption Editor appears.

  3. Click the arrow to the right of the Type field, and select a method for defining the tensile damage variable:

    • Select Strain to specify the tensile damage variable as a function of cracking strain.

    • Select Displacement to specify the tensile damage variable as a function of cracking displacement.

  4. In the Compression recovery field, enter a value for the stiffness recovery factor, wc, which determines the amount of compression stiffness that is recovered as the loading changes from tension to compression.

    If wc=1, the material fully recovers the compressive stiffness; if wc=0, there is no stiffness recovery. Intermediate values of wc (0wc1) result in partial recovery of the compressive stiffness. The default value is 1.0, which corresponds to the assumption that as cracks close the compressive stiffness is unaffected by tensile damage.

  5. Toggle on Use temperature-dependent data to define data that depend on temperature.

    A column labeled Temp appears in the Data table.

  6. Click the arrows to the right of the Number of field variables field to increase or decrease the number of field variables on which the data depend.
  7. In the Data table, enter the data relevant to your Type selection from Step 3 (not all of the following will apply):

    Damage Parameter

    Tensile damage variable, dt.

    Cracking Strain

    Direct cracking strain, ε~tck.

    Displacement

    Direct cracking displacement, utck. (Units of L.)

    Temp

    Temperature.

    Field n

    Predefined field variables.

  8. Click OK to return to the Edit Material dialog box.