Experimental validation of smeared analysis for plain concrete in torsion

This is the second of two papers concerned with the development and the app lication of a smeared crack model for the description of the behavior of co ncrete elements in torsion. The first paper presented the development of an efficient model for the torsional analysis of concrete that utilizes a spe cial numerical technique, which is properly adapted to include the smeared crack approach. This paper presents the validation of the analytical model by providing comparisons between analytically predicted behavior curves and experimentally obtained ones. The experimental data used in this paper com prise a series of tests in pure torsion conducted for this purpose and a da tabase of experimental information compiled from works around the world, in an attempt to establish the validity of the proposed approach based on a b road range of parametric studies. From the comparisons between the predicte d and the measured data, it is concluded that the proposed approach describ es very well the behavior of concrete elements in pure torsion and yields s atisfactory results for the case of nonrectangular elements subjected to co mbined torsion with flexure, shear, and axial force.