Nonlinear Analysis of Reinforced Concrete Walls Using New Concrete Model in OpenSees

Analysis of structural walls showed that the concrete model was limiting the accuracy of the simulation of the wall behavior. For an accurate and reliable prediction of the wall response, an effective and robust hysteretic constitutive model for concrete is needed. The Chang and Mander concrete model, which can accurately capture the concrete characteristics especially for the gradual gap closure and tension stiffening, was selected to model the concrete behavior in this paper and implemented into the open source finite element framework Open Sees. Then, analytical models of two walls were discussed and comparisons between the analytical models and the experimental results were presented to verify the accuracy of the analytical approach used in this study. In general, the multiple-vertical-line-element (MVLE) modeling approach adopted here to model the behavior of shear walls with the Chang and Mander concrete model was very successful at capturing the response of rectangular walls with symmetrical and unsymmetrical reinforcement details.