This thesis develops a novel modelling strategy depicted JSPM (joint-shell punching model) for simulating punching failure of reinforced concrete (RC) slabs in which non-linear joint elements are combined with nonlinear 2-D shell elements. Punching failure of the nonlinear joint is governed by the failure criterion of the critical shear crack the-ory (CSCT) of Muttoni (2008). A notable feature of the JSPM is that joint punching resistance is continually updated during the analysis in terms of the slab sector rotation calculated at the previous load step. This feature enables the JSPM to accurately simu-late the slab-column connection behaviour from the initial load stage, occurrence of punching (peak), followed by a transition to post-punching stage without the need of post-processing. This modelling strategy has been implemented in the nonlinear struc-tural analysis program ADAPTIC (Izzuddin, 1991).
Throughout the thesis, the proposed JSPM has been extended to simulate various practical scenarios, including punching of: slabs supported on elongated column, slabs subjected to eccentric loading (both monotonic and reversed-cyclic), and slabs with shear reinforcement. In total, 90 internal slab-column connections from test database were simulated to verify the proposed JSPM. In addition, NLFEA based on 3-D solid elements were simulated in ATENA (Cervenka et al., 2018) to provide an objective comparison (benchmark). The JSPM is shown to produce accurate predictions of the measured slab-column connection behaviour while requiring significantly less computa-tion time than the NLFEA with solid elements.
The analysis and comparison of the numerical and test data were used to inform design procedures: including: a) shear-field method to design slabs supported on elongated column or wall; b) simplified analytical method to determined drift-induced punching for slabs subjected to reversed-cyclic loading.