Peanut shaped auxetic cementitious cellular composite (ACCC)

Auxetic cementitious cellular composites (ACCCs) exhibit desirable mechanical properties (e.g., high fracture resistance and energy dissipation), due to their unique deformation characteristics. In this study, a new type of cementitious auxetic material, referred to as peanut shaped ACCC, has been designed and subsequently architected using...

Predicting micromechanical properties of cement paste from backscattered electron (BSE) images by computer vision

This paper employs computer vision techniques to predict the micromechanical properties (i.e., elastic modulus and hardness) of cement paste based on an input of Backscattered Electron (BSE) images. A dataset comprising 40,000 nanoindentation tests and 40,000 BSE micrographs was built by express nanoindentation test and Scanning Electron...

Flexural strength and fatigue properties of interfacial transition zone at the microscale

In this study, the flexural strength and fatigue properties of interfacial transition zone (ITZ) were experimentally investigated at the micrometre length scale. The hardened cement paste cantilevers (150 × 150 × 750 μm³) attached to a quartzite aggregate surface were prepared and tested under the monotonic and cyclic load using a...

Determination of loss of reinforcement due to corrosion through X-ray computer micro-tomography

X-ray computer scanning tomography (CT scan) is an increasingly more available technique, which has been applied to material sciences for years. Although most of its use is qualitative for gaining insights on material behavior, quantitative analysis for estimations of deterioration rates is possible. This paper describes an unbiased,...

Micromechanical testing and modelling of blast furnace slag cement pastes

This work aims to understand deformation and fracture processes in blast furnace slag cement pastes made using CEM III/B which is commonly used in the Dutch infrastructure sector. First, based on our previous work on Portland cement pastes, a micromechanical model utilizing nanoindentation and X-ray computed tomography (CT) for input is...

Deformation and fracture of 3D printed disordered lattice materials: Experiments and modeling

A method is presented to model deformation and fracture behavior of 3D printed disordered lattice materials under uniaxial tensile load. A lattice model was used to predict crack pattern and load-displacement response of the printed lattice materials. To include the influence of typical layered structures of 3D printed materials in the...

Micro-Cantilever Testing Of Cementitious Materials Under Various Loading Conditions

Nanoindentation is usually used to investigate local elastic properties and hardness of materials. In this paper, the nanoindenter served as a loading tool to perform micro scale bending tests and measure the global response of micro-scale specimens. For testing, cement paste cantilever beams with a square cross-section of 300 μm × 300 μm were...

Size effect on splitting strength of hardened cement paste: Experimental and numerical study

Cement paste possesses complex microstructural features including defects/pores over a range of length-scales, from nanometres to millimetres in size. As a consequence, it exhibits different behaviour under loading depending on the size. In this work, cubic specimens in a size range of 1: 400 were produced and tested by a one-sided splitting...