Fracture of concrete structure using simplified meshless method

Numerical analysis of fracture in concrete is studied with a simplified meshless method. In this meshless method, the crack is represented by a set of disconnected cohesive crack segments that are required to pass through meshless nodes. The crack method therefore falls in the category of discrete crack methods. However, in contrast to most other methods where the crack is represented as continuous line/surface, no representation of the crack surface is needed. Hence, there is no need to track the crack path. Branching cracks and coalescing cracks are a natural outcome of the analysis and no specific algorithms need to be incorporated to model such complicated events. Besides the simplicity of the method, the accuracy is maintained. This is demonstrated through several examples.