Simulation of headed anchor failure

This work concerns the numerical simulation of the failure behavior of headed studs embedded in concrete and subjected to tensile loading. The attention is directed to the analysis of a single anchor placed in a specimen of undamaged concrete without reinforcement and far from the specimen edges. The simulations are carried out by means of two different constitutive models: 1) a smeared crack model with nonlocal regularization (nonlocal microplane model M4) and 2) a discrete model simulating the concrete mesostructure (shear-confinement lattice model). The ability of both models to predict the anchor ultimate load is checked through the comparison of the numerical results with some available experimental data and various design formulas taken from the literature (ACI-method, VAC-method, CC-method and Theoretical method). Both the nonlocal microplane model and the shear-confinement lattice model are able to predict the ultimate load of the headed anchor under tension and to reproduce the well-known cone-shaped failure of the embedding concrete.