Boundary element analysis of the pullout behaviour of an anchor bolt embedded in concrete

A boundary element formulation for the analysis of pullout behaviour of an anchor bolt embedded in concrete is presented. The pullout analysis involves modelling two different bodies (i.e. anchor head and concrete) which are in contact over a certain region. The fracture of concrete is represented by the fictitious crack model (FCM) in which the fracture zone is replaced by applying closing forces on both crack surface. The FCM in conjunction with the boundary element method (BEM) allows the simulation of crack growth in concrete in a straight forward manner without remeshing. The crack path need not be known in advance as it is calculated during the iteration process. The numerical results obtained are compared with the round-robin analysis of pullout test proposed by RILEM TC 90-FMA.