An efficient numerical method for meso-scopic fatigue damage analysis of heterogeneous concrete

Abstract A numerical method is developed to simulate effectively meso-scopic damage evolution of concrete subjected to cyclic fatigue loading based on considering its heterogeneous material constituents. In the developed method, a fatigue damage evolution gradient controlled procedure is developed to speed up fatigue damage simulation in a reasonable way by using the developed damage model. In the procedure, the block cycle jump strategy is used and the maximal fatigue damage accumulation for each block cyclic loading is controlled to be less than the pre-set value based on the condition of efficiency and precision. In addition, a heterogeneous concrete modeling strategy is developed and used to consider heterogeneous material constituents with lower computational cost, in which material parameters are assumed to obey some kinds of probability distribution such as Gaussian distribution. A representative numerical example supports the effectiveness of the developed numerical method, which illustrates its ability to simulate well fatigue damage evolution of heterogeneous concrete. From simulation results obtained from different finite element models with coarse and fine mesh. We can also find that fatigue analysis results are insensitive to gird mesh by using the developed numerical method.