Yield design of reinforced concrete slabs using a rotation-free meshfree method

This paper presents a numerical kinematic procedure for yield design of reinforced concrete slabs governed by Nielsen׳s yield criterion that uses a rotation-free meshfree method and second-order cone programming. A moving least squares approximation technique is employed to approximate the transverse displacement field without using rotational degrees of freedom. A curvature smoothing stabilization technique is applied, ensuring that the size of the resulting optimization problem is reduced significantly. The resulting optimization was solved using a highly efficient primal-dual interior point algorithm. Various reinforced concrete slab problems with arbitrary geometries and different boundary conditions were solved to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed numerical procedure.