Calibration of Concrete Damaged Plasticity Model parameters for shear walls

Reinforced concrete structures are relatively complex to analyze, with nonlinear effects like cracking, crushing, steel yielding, aggregate interlock, dowel effect, concrete-rebar interaction and so on. The concrete damaged plasticity CDP model is a consolidated smeared-crack model which accounts for multiaxial behavior with good agreement to experimental results. One particular relevant application which benefits greatly from such feature is the shear wall, as shear stress significantly influences its overall behavior, therefore multiaxial constitutive models and three-dimensional finite elements usage consist in a fitting modeling approach. Reinforced concrete shear walls are structures especially useful for lateral force-resisting systems, as they provide ductility, stiffness and strength. Albeit CDP is widely applied, its parameters are not consensus in the literature, which represents a relevant research gap. The present work considers and compares CDP parameters from relevant literature, in order to calibrate those parameters for the case of reinforced concrete shear walls. To this purpose, four wall experiments related in the bibliography are modeled using solid finite elements for concrete and trusses for rebars using commercial package ABAQUS. All walls are flexure-controlled with aspect ratio greater than 2.0. By varying those parameters and comparing obtained force vs. displacement curves and interesting values attained, like yield lateral force and displacement, stiffness and maximum lateral force, it is settled a set of parameters with acceptable response focusing in the post-peak response based on the lower estimated error of displacement capacity. Those parameters agree reasonably with literature, although it is possible that obtained calibration is restricted to flexure controlled shear walls scope. It is possible that usage of trusses to represent reinforcement does not consider dowel effect, so a suggestion for future studies is to change trusses for elements with transverse stiffness, like beams or solids. Keywords: calibration, concrete damaged plasticity, concrete constitutive model, shear walls.