Nonlinear Finite Element Analysis (NLFEA) is taking off. The standards and codes are still lagging behind. MC2020 should make the difference in prescribing all of the aspects to setup, perform and check a NLFEA. For this purpose, many known experiments have to be analysed to prove the safety concepts and show the reliability of advanced nonlinear approaches. DIANA is a multipurpose software package, that allows for automatic analysis of large sets of experiments, that have been performed in the past.
Based on an automatic modelling, material and analysis approach, 101 beams from different databases have been analysed. For this selection of beams, the impacts of different aspects of a solution strategy on the model uncertainty are quantified. After the completion of the full nonlinear calculation with mean and/or design (SLS/ULS) material properties, a report is automatically generated containing the overview of the input, analysis and output checks. In this way, the safety margins between experiments and ULS design analyses against a current code and or future MC2020 propositions are shown in the paper. A new development is the introduction of the ductility index in DIANA. Based on the energy dissipation difference between the concrete and steel materials, the ductility of the structure is shown. This is a very important parameter in design of structures. The definition is based on the ratio of energy dissipated in the steel reinforcement and the total energy dissipation of the structure.
