Strong discontinuity modeling of cracking in concrete

The ingredients to model the onset and development of cracking, in plain or reinforced concrete, in a strong discontinuity scenario are given. After describing the analytical foundations of the strong discontinuity approach (SDA), such as the strong discontinuity kinematics, softening regularization and the discontinuous bifurcation analysis, numerical issues like finite elements with embedded discontinuities and propagation algorithms are presented. A viscous perturbation based algorithm, to unfold bifurcations due to simultaneous crack arrest/activation for multiple crack cases, is described as well. Numerical examples show the performance of the presented methodology.