PHAETHON: Software for Analysis of Shear-Critical Reinforced Concrete Columns

Earthquake collapse of substandard reinforced concrete (RC) buildings, designed and constructed before the development of modern seismic design Codes, has triggered intense efforts by the scientific community for accurate assessment of this building stock. Most of the proposed procedures for the prediction of building strength and deformation indices were validated by assembling databases of RC column specimens tested under axial load and reversed cyclic lateral drift histories. Usually a column structural behavior is assessed by considering all involving mechanisms of behavior, namely flexure with or without the presence of axial load, shear and anchorage. In the present paper a force-based fiber beam/column element was developed accounting for shear and tension stiffening effects in order to provide an analytical test-bed for simulation of experimental cases such as the lightly reinforced columns forced to collapse. Their peculiar characteristics are the outcome of the shear – flexure interaction mechanism modeled here based on the Modified Compression Field Theory (MCFT) and the significant contribution of the tensile reinforcement pullout from its anchorage to the total column’s lateral drift. These features are embedded in this first-proposed stand-alone Windows program named “Phaethon†-with user’s interface written in C++ programming language code- aiming to facilitate engineers in executing analyses both for rectangular and circular substandard RC columns.