Related papers: Fracture toughness of calcium-silicate-hydrate gra…
In order to design tougher materials, it is crucial to understand the relationship between their composition and their resistance to fracture. To this end, we investigate the fracture toughness of usual sodium silicate glasses (NS) and…
Understanding, predicting and eventually improving the resistance to fracture of silicate materials is of primary importance to design new glasses that would be tougher, while retaining their transparency. However, the atomic mechanism of…
This paper describes COMSOL simulations of the stress and crack development in the area where a masonry wall supports a floor. In these simulations one of the main material properties of calcium silicate, its E-value, was assigned randomly…
Understanding the physical origin of creep in calcium--silicate--hydrate (C--S--H) is of primary importance, both for fundamental and practical interest. Here, we present a new method, based on molecular dynamics simulation, allowing us to…
Fracture toughness is a critical mechanical property of glasses, but a detailed understanding of its link to composition and structure is still missing. Here, focusing on the industrially important family of calcium aluminosilicate glasses,…
Bio-chemical reactions enable the production of biomimetic materials such as sandstones. In the present study, microbiologically-induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP) is used to manufacture laboratory-scale specimens for fracture…
Fracture is the ultimate source of failure of amorphous carbon (a-C) films, however it is challenging to measure fracture properties of a-C from nano-indentation tests and results of reported experiments are not consistent. Here, we use…
CO$_2$ emissions originating from the construction industry have a significant impact on global warming where the production of ordinary Portland cement clinker is responsible for approximately 8\% of all human-made CO$_2$. Alkali doped…
Understanding the fracture mechanisms in composite materials across scales, from nano- to micro-scales, is essential for an in-depth understanding of the reinforcement mechanisms and designing the next generation of lightweight,…
Fracture toughness $K_{IC}$ plays an important role in materials design. Along with numerous experimental methods to measure fracture toughness of materials, its understanding and theoretical prediction is very important. However,…
Understanding transport behavior in nanoconfined environments is critical to many natural and engineering systems, including cementitious materials, yet its molecular-level mechanisms remain poorly understood. Here, molecular dynamics (MD)…
Arguably the most ubiquitous construction material in modern civilization, concrete is enabling the development of megacities around the globe together with increasing living standards in developing nations. However, it can be argued that…
The widespread use of sodium aluminosilicate glass in many engineering applications due to its mechanical and optical properties (transparency, dielectric, etc.), has become common in recent years. However, glass, a brittle material, has…
Guided by recent advances in the understanding of nucleation and propagation of fracture in elastic brittle materials, this paper proposes a suite of three simple experiments that permit the measurement of the three macroscopic material…
Tight-binding molecular dynamics simulations shed light into the fracture mechanisms and the ideal strength of tetrahedral amorphous carbon and of nanocomposite carbon containing diamond crystallites, two of the hardest materials. It is…
Calcium silicate hydrates (C-S-H), the main components of hydrated cement, are known for being responsible of its cohesion. In this respect, they act as "glue" for the other solid components of mortar or concrete and thus strongly influence…
We use large-scale simulations to investigate the dynamic fracture of silica and sodium-silicate glasses under uniaxial tension. The stress-strain curves demonstrate that silica glass is brittle whereas the glasses rich in Na show…
We test and simulate the mesoscopic cracking behavior of specimens made of a standard concrete mixture. To this end, we combine stable wedge-splitting fracture experiments performed during X-ray tomography, their analysis with digital…
The nature of Calcium--Silicate--Hydrate (C--S--H), the binding phase of cement, remains a controversial question. In particular, contrary to the former crystalline model, it was recently proposed that its nanoscale structure was actually…
The fracture energy of brittle materials rises with crack velocity, and this effect is typically attributed to surface roughening from path instabilities. Here we show, using molecular dynamics simulations of silica glass with a…