Development of Multiaxial Constitutive Relationships for Concrete

Recent research in structural fire engineering has shown that concrete or composite building structures can develop unexpected modes of strength when subjected to fire. Under certain conditions, a structure will present a robust behavior that can dramatically increase its fire resistance compared to the fire resistance calculated by a predictive approach. An example of such robust behavior is the membrane action that can be developed by a structural slab in fire. However, the numerical simulation of such behaviors requires the development of reliable and accurate multiaxial constitutive relationships for modelling the behavior of concrete. This presentation is based on the work performed by the author during a six month research stay at CEA Saclay, in the team of Alain Millard. The aim of the research stay was to develop a concrete multiaxial model that can be used for the numerical analysis by the finite elements method of concrete structures in fire. To be able to accurately simulate the structural behavior during every phases of a natural fire, the concrete model includes plasticity and damage phenomena. The main features and parameters of the model are presented and its implementation in the softwares SAFIR and CAST3M is briefly discussed. Then, a few applications are given and the presentation ends with a comment on the remaining issues and perspectives.