The research reported in this thesis has been carried out at the Civil Engineering Department of Delft University of Technology. This research was supported by the Technology Foundation (STW) under grant DCT 72.1405. The additional financial support by TNO Building and Construction Research is highly appreciated.
I would like to gratefully acknowledge ray supervisor Professor Rene de Borst for his guidance during this study. Furthermore, I wish to record thanks to all my colleagues of the Computational Mechanics Group of the Civil Engineering Department, Han Schellekens, Bert Sluys, Jerzy Pamin, Wang Wei Min, Zhangping Wu, Arend Groen and Paolo Louren§o for their interest and support during the work* I also wish to express my deep appreciation and gratitude to Jan Rots of TNO Building and Construction Research for his encouragements and fruitful discussions throughout the course of this study.
The models described in this thesis have been implemented in the DIANA finite element code of TNO Building and Construction Research which is commercially available through the DIANA Analysis b.v. The calculations have been performed on a Silicon Graphics Workstation operated by Harold Thung who I like to thank for his support.