What FE package? Pre/Post-stressed Reinforced Concrete

[mlancaco]

Hello,

I would like to ask you for your feedback on successful use of FE packages in the analysis/design of complex concrete structures - I try to explain what we need it for below.

The main FE package used here is Ansys, since the majority of users are dealing with other (steel or cast iron) components.
We had Ansys CivilFEM for a while, but it is a bit buggy, not really flexible and lacked key capabilities, for our purposes at least. The material and soil library were relatively useful though.

We experience some difficulty in using Ansys for FEA of concrete components and are benchmarking ABAQUS and DIANA, considering that these packages are somewhat more comprehensive in their concrete modelling capabilities.

We are designing reinforced concrete structures subject to substantial loading, in terms of magnitude and number of cycles.
These structures comprise wind turbine footings and towers, both in onshore and offshore conditions, with passive and active reinforcement, with embedded (or connected to) structural steel components. Cracking analysis is of importance to our applications to account for loss of stiffness. Soil interaction and hydrodynamic modelling is also important and ideally there would be at least the possibility of linking it with another tool for this purpose.

Any thoughts on ABAQUS, TNO DIANA or other packages that allow for non-linear modelling/code checking of reinforced concrete for the applications mentioned above?
Thanks in advance for your feedback!

 

[OneDay11]

I work in the offshore industry and the FEA package of choice around here is SESAM. Not sure how good it is with concrete elements. No one around here uses it for concrete. I know its excellent for structures that face hydro dynamic loads. Check out the link.
I used to work in a company that did a lot of work with cocnrete shell structures. They had basically created their own program using excel macros and FEA principals. Concrete cracing simulations were checked iterativly. i believe the initial run was with no cracks and then if there were areas that went beyond unity then a new run would be made with reduced sections in the areas that were beyond unity to simulate cracks... this would be done over and over until you got convergence. There might be much better suggestions for you but this is just my experience.

http://www.dnv.com/services/software/products/sesam/

 

[mlancaco]

Thanks OneDay11,

SESAM is, from what I've gathered (and we've had reps from DNV showing us its capabilities) not really oriented to concrete FEA.

We also use our own tools and do FE without considering non-linear effects but the objective is to identify packages that are user-friendly and specifically focused on solving concrete problems efficiently.
Regards!

 

[pgpada]

I don't know about concrete structures but you could check out ANSA which is very usable.

PGP