Abstract
Interest in self-healing techniques that can enhance the performance of cementitious materials has been ever increasing over the past two decades. Alongside the experimental developments, a great deal of progress has been made on the development of numerical models for simulating the self-healing behavior. In spite of this, many models do not consider the coupled physical processes that govern the healing response. In addition, few are developed in a 3D setting that is necessary for many self-healing systems. This study aims to address this through the development of a new 3D coupled model for simulating self-healing cementitious materials. Key features of the model are a new embedded strong discontinuity hexahedral element that employs a damage-healing cohesive zone model to describe the mechanical behavior, a new approach for describing the dependence of the mechanical regain on healing agent transport based on a local crack filling function, and a generalized healing front model that is applicable to different healing agents. The performance of the model is demonstrated with a healing front study and experimental tests on self-healing cementitious specimens. The examples consider a vascular self-healing cementitious specimen that uses a sodium silicate solution as the healing agent and the autogenous healing of a cementitious specimen with and without crystalline admixtures. The results of the validations show that the model is able to reproduce the experimentally observed behavior with good accuracy.
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Data Availability Statement
All data generated or used during the study are available in a repository online in accordance with funder data retention policies. Information on the data underpinning the results presented here, including how to access them, can be found in the Cardiff University data catalogue at (https://doi.org/10.17035/d.2022.0217821360).
Acknowledgments
Financial support from the EPSRC Grant EP/P02081X/1 “Resilient materials for life (RM4L)” is gratefully acknowledged.
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Information
Published In
Journal of Engineering Mechanics
Volume 149 • Issue 7 • July 2023
Copyright
© 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Sep 9, 2022
Accepted: Feb 24, 2023
Published online: Apr 24, 2023
Published in print: Jul 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Sep 24, 2023
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Cement
- Concrete
- Coupling
- Discontinuities
- Engineering fundamentals
- Engineering materials (by type)
- Finite element method
- Material mechanics
- Materials engineering
- Mathematical functions
- Mathematics
- Methodology (by type)
- Models (by type)
- Numerical methods
- Numerical models
- Simulation models
- Structural engineering
- Structural members
- Structural systems
- Three-dimensional models
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