Nonlinear Analysis for the Crack Control of SMA Smart Concrete Beam Based on a Bidirectional B-Spline QR Method

A bidirectional B-spline QR method (BB-sQRM) for the study on the crack control of the reinforced concrete (RC) beam embedded with shape memory alloy (SMA) wires is presented. In the proposed method, the discretization is performed with a set of spline nodes in two directions of the plane model, and structural displacement fields are constructed by the linear combination of the products of cubic B-spline interpolation functions. To derive the elastoplastic stiffness equation of the RC beam, an explicit form is utilized to express the elastoplastic constitutive law of concrete materials. The proposed model is compared with the ANSYS model in several numerical examples. The results not only show that the solutions given by the BB-sQRM are very close to those given by the finite element method (FEM) but also prove the high efficiency and low computational cost of the BB-sQRM. Meanwhile, the five parameters, such as depth-span ratio, thickness of concrete cover, reinforcement ratio, prestrain, and eccentricity of SMA wires, are investigated to learn their effects on the crack control. The results show that depth-span ratio of RC beams and prestrain and eccentricity of SMA wires have a significant influence on the control performance of beam cracks.