Looking for alternatives to using *CONSTRAINED_BEAM_IN_SOLID for beam elements in a 3D mesh
I am trying to scale a nuclear reactor building down so that it can be built out of steel on a shake table so that the scaled model exhibits similar behavior to the full size building model when excited by seismic loads. I was able to model the walls of the nuclear reactor building individually and figure out how to scale the walls down so that they exhibit similar behavior when they're bent about their weak axes, but these massive reinforced concrete walls already took 10 hours to run individually on a cluster with 32 cores. Now, I need to build a, (somewhat simplified), model of the whole building in LS-DYNA, including all the walls in the structure, the roof and the floor. The issue is that the runtime for the individual walls took ~10 hours, and for the entire building, I would imagine the runtime to greatly increase. So, I'm wondering if anyone has figured out how to model reinforced concrete with different element formulations that run more quickly than using 3D 8-node solid elements for the concrete, and using the *CONSTRAINED_BEAM_IN_SOLID keyword to model the reinforcement bars using beam elements inside the concrete. Preferably, I'd like to be able to model the reinforcement without using a smeared reinforcement approximation, but if that's the only viable solution, that might be the solution for me to try to pursue. Does anyone have any advice?
