Coupling of nonlinear models for steel-concrete interaction in structural RC joints

When strong seismic forces act on reinforced concrete structures, their beam-column connections are very susceptible to damage during the earthquake event. The aim of this numerical work is to evaluate the influence of the internal steel reinforcement array on the nonlinear response of a RC beam-column connection when it is subjected to strong cyclic loading –as a seismic load. For this, two specimens (extracted from an experimental test of 12 RC beam-column connections reported in literature) were modeled in the Finite Element code FEAP considering different stirrup\' s arrays. In order to evaluate the nonlinear response of the RC beam-column connection, the 2D model takes into account the nonlinear thermodynamic behavior of each component: for concrete, a damage model is used; for steel reinforcement, it is adopted a classical plasticity model; in the case of the steel-concrete bonding, this one is considered perfect without degradation. At the end, we show a comparison between the experimental test