Computational Mechanics in Construction and Building Materials

Dear Colleagues,

The global construction sector faces mounting challenges in achieving carbon neutrality, enhancing infrastructure resilience, and extending the service life of built assets under increasingly severe environmental conditions. Construction and building materials exhibit complex mechanical behaviors governed by multi-physics interactions across multiple length scales. Accurate characterization and prediction of these behaviors are critical for designing durable structures, optimizing material formulations, and reducing the environmental footprint of the built environment. As computational power continues to grow and numerical methodologies mature, computational mechanics has become an indispensable tool for dictating material performance from the nanoscale to the structural level. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, physics-informed machine learning, and high-performance computing have opened new avenues for bridging experimental observations with predictive simulation, enabling the development of digital twins, surrogate models, and data-driven constitutive frameworks for construction materials.

This Special Issue aims to present and disseminate the most recent advances related to computational mechanics in the characterization, modeling, and simulation of construction and building materials. We invite contributions addressing theoretical developments, novel numerical methodologies, multi-scale characterization and multi-physics modeling strategies, and practical applications that advance the predictive capabilities for material and structural performance. Studies that integrate experimental characterization with computational analysis, as well as those exploring data-driven and AI-enhanced approaches, are particularly welcome.

Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to:

• Multi-scale and multi-physics modeling of cementitious, ceramic, polymeric, and composite building materials;
• Advanced finite element, mesh-free, discrete element, and peridynamic formulations for material and structural simulation;
• Damage, fracture, fatigue, and failure mechanics in the construction materials under static, dynamic, cyclic, and extreme loading conditions;
• Durability modeling and predictive simulation of degradation processes, including carbonation, chloride ingress, alkali-silica reaction, sulfate attack, freeze–thaw action, and wet-dry cycling effects;
• Constitutive modeling for conventional and innovative sustainable construction materials, including high-performance concrete, fiber-reinforced composites, alkali-activated materials, and recycled concrete;
• Computational methods for sustainable and low-carbon construction materials, encompassing life-cycle assessment integration and circular economy-driven structural optimization;
• High-performance and parallel computing for large-scale simulations of complex structural systems and material microstructures.

Dr. Chengcheng Fan
Guest Editor

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