The focus of the research is to develop an embedded crack analytical method for assessing the serviceability and safety of concrete and masonry structures. The behavior of reinforced concrete/masonry structures is complicated due to the interaction of ductile and brittle materials. With the addition of steel reinforcement, different limit states and failure modes, ranging from ductile to brittle, can evolve in concrete/masonry structures, depending on the loading conditions as well as the quantity of reinforcement. The ability to capture these mechanisms is of primary importance for the evaluation of existing civil infrastructure systems as well as for the design of new structures. Existing analytical methods using the discrete or smeared crack modeling approach suffer from a number of shortcomings. The smeared crack approach cannot capture the brittle shear behavior of reinforced concrete deep beams and shear walls, while the discrete crack approach is not suitable for modeling diffuse cracks. Hence, a third approach based on an efficient in that it does not require remeshing, which is often needed in the discrete crack analysis, and it is able to eradicate the major deficiencies of the smeared crack approach by introducing a displacement discontinuity within the element domain. The concept is new and has a sound theoretical basis founded on variational principles.
