The Equivalent Constitutive Relationship for Reinforced Concrete Based on Tension-Stiffening

The tension stiffening of concrete affects the stiffness and deflection of reinforced concrete. The equivalent constitutive relationship for reinforced concrete(RC) including three stages was obtained in this paper. The moment of inertia and the distance from the neutral axis to the extreme fiber at the critical points were computed by the transformed section approach. A comparison between the deflections of beams calculated by ACI 318 and Eurocode 2 shows that the predictions by Eurocode 2 are closer to experimental observations. The non-elastic bending theory was used in the first stage, and the elastic modulus was obtained. The method of Eurocode 2 was adopted to calculate the parameters in the cross section in the second and third stages, and the equivalent stress-strain relationship was obtained.