Towards Developing Reinforced Concrete Structures Digital Twins: A Multiscale Lattice Discrete Particle Model Approach

Digital Twins (DT) provide a critical approach to connecting physical structures and corresponding virtual representations through constant observations-to-decision flows, enabling near real-time analysis and assessment of structural health. A critical component of DTs of reinforced concrete structures lies in the definition of prognostic capabilities to predict/infer the system response. This is achieved by devising efficient computational methods for the simulation of the mechanical behavior of the system. This study presents the first step in devising a Multiscale Lattice Discrete Particle Model (M-LDPM) approach to be embedded in a DT framework to allow for forward prediction of damage evolution in the structural system. In the DT framework, a modification of the M-LDPM is proposed to address well-known issues associated with linking the macroscopic mesh configuration and the corresponding representative volume elements, significantly reducing the total computational cost. The effectiveness of the proposed multiscale model is validated by comparing numerical results with the full-order solutions for plain concrete members under 3-point bending, and further investigated by comparison with experimental results on three reinforced concrete beams.