ABSTRACT
Damage diagnosis of concrete structures is extremely important and principle task is to extract damage features. The most basic and direct information to characterize damage of concrete structures is the appearance of cracks – formation of cracks pattern. Nonlinear fracture mechanics finite element simulation utilizing fracture mechanics can provide crack patterns at both 2D and 3D levels for the whole process of loading – till the complete failure. The paper proposed a new approach to assess damage based on such crack patterns. The damage level is assessed virtually utilizing computational modelling. The fractal dimension provides a viable way to assess the severity of concrete damage and has been applied for experiments but not for crack patterns obtained virtually by computational simulation. The improvement is the multifractal dimensions which could serve as the superior damage characteristics indicator. As computational simulation of crack patterns can be performed for any load level, by comparison of virtual crack patterns and real ones, damage level can be evaluated based on fractal (or multifractal) dimensions. The suggested approach can help evaluate the residual resistance of existing structures based on comparison of cracks pattern obtained from real structure and from computational modelling.
