This paper presents a new adaptive multi-grid method for analyses on damage and failure in concrete column under cyclic loading. Self-adaptation of the method can carry out automatically coupling analysis on the process of evolving damage to structural failure with dynamic grid-change due to damage, without user intervention in the computation. The theory of multi-grid FEM coupled evolving damage is developed on the basis of the improved variational principle to consider damage evolution, in which the elements in each sub-domain with different grid sizes are under the different state of damage. Then the multi-grid FEM method is provided with the theory and a 3D adaptive mesh refinement procedure. As a case study of the method, the process of evolving damage to failure of a concrete column under cyclic loading is simulated by using the developed method, and the simulated results fit well with the experimental data. The results show that, the developed method is reliable in simulation on evolving damage and failure in concrete column under dynamic seismic loading with lower cost and sufficient precision
