RC beam response to impact utilizing rigid-viscoplastic linear complementarity

A recent study on rigid-plastic response in the form of a linear complementarity problem (LCP) was successfully employed to determine the shear critical behavior of impacted RC beams. This study also emphasized the need for a numerical model that predicts flexural-dominated dynamic response. Therefore, the development of a flexural dominant numerical framework considering rigid-viscoplasticity in the material model of the linear complementarity problem is presented. The numerical framework incorporates an empirical dynamic increase factor (DIF) to attain the effects of loading rates according to the behavior of RC beams. Statistical and numerical studies are carried out to evaluate the performance of the rigid-viscoplastic LCP or VLCP. Specifically, a statistical comparative study asses the maximum deflection of impacted RC beams using a database containing 118 beams that are failing in flexural mode. Moreover, a numerical study using ABAQUS confirms the performance of the rigid-viscoplastic LCP in terms of computational cost and efficiency.