Assessment of size effect in concrete damage plasticity model

In this research, it has been attempted to investigate the ability of the Concrete Damage Plasticity (CDP) material model of the ABAQUS standard software to take into account the size effect phenomenon in simulating the behavior of concrete structures automatically. To this end, three different size concrete beams with the same concrete material behavior which were used in a standardized three point bending test experiment were simulated by the ABAQUS software using the so-called CDP model for the concrete material. An optimization procedure was defined and performed in order to find the appropriate values for the input parameters of the CDP model used in the simulations. In addition to the material model, the same boundary conditions and finite element mesh attributes were implemented in the three test simulations enabling the authors to assess just only the effects of the size of the specimens on the obtained results. After comparison of the results obtained from simulation with the corresponding ones extracted from the experiment, it was revealed that the CDP model of the ABAQUS software can automatically take into account the size effects on the load-deflection behavior of the concrete beams under the three point bending loading.