Respected sirs/madams

I am working on failure analysis of concrete. I am trying to simulate in ANSYS, I heard about element birth/death option for changing the status of element during analysis. My doubt is whether I can use this element birth/death option for analysis or this is only used as a postprocessing tool.

 I am trying is to reduce the stiffness of the elements whose maximum principal stress reaches the ultimate strength of concrete and than further apply load in the susequent load step on the finite element model whose elements are removed.

Please help me in understanding element birth/death