Investigation on the Nonlinear Behavior of Reinforced Concrete

Concrete with high strength and quality as an economical and effective material has been developed considerably in construction industry. Components of concrete and interaction between them is significant in mechanical characteristics of it; so by a good understanding of this relationship, it is possible to select the type and amount of materials in order to have a concrete with an efficient behavior against external loads. One of the effective methods for determining the precise behavior of reinforced concrete beams starting from first step of loading and ending at failure stage and also calculating the cracking, yielding and ultimate loads is nonlinear finite elements. The advantage of this method is to determined, the behavior of beam in all loading stages and also in all points in a beam. In this method, the geometry of a beam is introduced by 4-node elements and strain, stress and deflection in various points of beam can be determined using nonlinear analysis. In this paper the behavior of reinforced concrete beams with high strength concrete which had been tested, is investigated applying finite elements and the effective parameters are determined. Considering the parametric studies, the nonlinear results show a good agreement with available experimental data.