Effects of repeated loading on creep deflection of reinforced concrete beams

Abstract

This paper presents a computational procedure to predict deflections of reinforced concrete beams subjected to repeated loading in addition to sustained static loading. A semi-empirical constitutive model is adopted to account for the effects of creep (basic, drying and cyclic) and shrinkage. A numerical iterative procedure is proposed to update the stress and total strain of each layer. Numerical results are compared with available experimental results as well as results obtained by some analytical methods. The comparison shows that the proposed procedure accounts for more parameters than other methods considered and is generally in better agreement with the experimental results. Parametric studies are carried out to study the effects of various parameters including the excitation frequency and concrete composition. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.