Fracture and Dynamic Behavior of Construction Materials Under Extreme Loading

A special issue of Buildings (ISSN 2075-5309). This special issue belongs to the section "Building Materials, and Repair & Renovation".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2026 | Viewed by 38

Special Issue Editors


E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
State Key Laboratory of Hydraulics and Mountain River Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China
Interests: renovation of building materials; fracture evolution; dynamic behavior; mesoscopic damage; extreme loading; underground cavern

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China
Interests: rockfall processes and mitigation; constitutive modelling of geomaterials; geotechnical earthquake engineering
College of Water Resources and Hydropower, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China
Interests: meso-macroscopic mechanics; constitutive model of building materials; surrounding rock stability

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to a Special Issue of Buildings titled “Fracture and Dynamic Behavior of Construction Materials under Extreme Loading”. Construction materials in buildings and underground infrastructures—including concrete, mortar, rock, masonry, asphalt, and repaired/retrofitted composites—are increasingly exposed to extreme factors such as impact, blast, seismic excitation, rockfall, and excavation-induced unloading. These conditions can activate complex, rate-dependent fracture processes, mesoscopic damage accumulation, and progressive collapse mechanisms that are still challenging to characterize and predict.

This Special Issue welcomes experimental, theoretical, and numerical studies (e.g., FEM/DEM/FDEM) related to the fracture and dynamic behavior of construction materials under extreme loading. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

  1. Dynamic fracture and failure under impact, blast, seismic excitation, and excavation-induced unloading;
  2. High-strain-rate testing, dynamic strength characterization, and parameter identification;
  3. Crack initiation, propagation, coalescence, and fragmentation mechanisms;
  4. Multiscale/mesoscopic damage evolution and microstructure-informed interpretation;
  5. Rate-dependent constitutive modeling, damage–plasticity, and softening/regularization strategies;
  6. Energy dissipation, fracture energy, hysteresis, and post-peak response;
  7. Numerical simulation and hybrid methods (FEM/DEM/FDEM/SPH/peridynamics) and validation;
  8. The coupled behavior of materials–structures–surrounding rock under combined static–dynamic actions;
  9. The performance of repaired/retrofitted materials and resilient design implications.

We warmly welcome contributions from researchers and practitioners worldwide, and we hope this Special Issue will foster meaningful exchange and discussion. Thank you in advance for your interest and contributions.

Prof. Dr. Jianhai Zhang
Dr. Youneng Liu
Dr. Li Qian
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Buildings is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • rockfall
  • collapse
  • fracture
  • rock dynamics
  • karst geology
  • FDEM simulation
  • rock constitutive model
  • mesoscopic damage
  • underground engineering

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Published Papers

This special issue is now open for submission.
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