RC deep beams with unconventional geometries: Experimental and numerical analyses

This work presents numerical and experimental analyses of the behavior of reinforced-concrete deep beams with unconventional geometries. The main goal here is to experimentally and numerically study these geometries to find possible new behaviors due to the material nonlinearity of reinforced concrete with complex geometries. Usually, unconventional geometries result from innovative designs; in general, studies of reinforced concrete structures are performed only on conventional members such as beams, columns, and labs. To achieve the goal, four reinforced-concrete deep beams with geometries not addressed in the literature were tested. The models were numerically analyzed with the Adaptive Micro Truss Model (AMTM), which is the proposed method, to address new geometries. This work also studied the main parameters of the constitutive model of concrete based on a statistical analysis of the finite element (FE) results. To estimate the ultimate loads, FE simulations were performed using the Monte Carlo method. Based on the obtained ultimate loads, a probabilistic distribution was created, and the final ultimate loads were computed.