Seismic Assessment of Reinforced Concrete Beam-Column Connection Using Multi-scale Finite Element Modelling

Post-earthquake damage survey reports reveal that reinforced concrete (RC) beam-column connections undergo large inelastic deformations during an earthquake and their failure can compromise the overall stability of the reinforced concrete building. This stirred the concern for in-depth understanding of nonlinear behaviour and failure mechanism of such connections. In this paper, nonlinear finite element analysis of RC beam-column connection using concurrent multi-scale framework is performed to investigate the governing failure mechanism in the joint region under monotonic and reverse cyclic loading. Sensitivity analysis is carried out to finalise various modelling parameters like optimal mesh size, dilation angle, viscosity and strain rate. The developed computational model is therefore compared with the available experimental results to examine its efficacy in predicting the structural response. The obtained results advocate the capability of the developed computational model in realistic assessment of the performance of RC beam-column connection and capturing the governing failure mechanism.