The simulation of nonlinear effects, especially damage and deterioration effects, in reinforced concrete has been one of the major research tasks in civil engineering within the last two decades. This paper presents a universal constitutive law for concrete under monotonic and cyclic loading, capable to simulate monotonous as well as cyclic load behaviour in the compression regime and consisting of a linear-elastic component, a plasticity component and a damage (micro-crack) component. The material model has been extended into the tensile stress regime by using a Rankine failure criterion. A debonding model, based on energy release rates has been implemented in order to simulate the interaction between reinforcement and concrete matrix. This constitutive formulation has been implemented into a flexible object-oriented finite element software frame ORPHEUS-FEMAS. The software platform uses a high level data structure, derived from the radial-edge data structure, capable to describe general non-manifold topologies. The data structure, modified for handling of finite element discretization data, shows impressive runtime efficiency and minimum storage requirements.

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