Fracture Toughness and Modelling of Concrete Composites and Other Brittle Materials

Dear Colleagues,

It is my pleasure to invite you to submit a manuscript to the forthcoming Special Issue “Fracture Toughness and Modeling of Concrete Composites and other Brittle Materials” in Materials (Impact Factor 2.972).

Fracture toughness is an extremely important parameter determining the properties of a given material, especially of a construction material. The material constants determined in compressive and tensile tests are not enough because often, materials with high mechanical properties (high strength) have low fracture toughness. In this case, such materials have limited usefulness as structural materials, especially in terms of fatigue loads in a given structure.

Cracks are an evident threat to the structure, as they significantly reduce its strength. The size of cracks formed in construction elements can be presented in the form of a function of operating time or number of load cycles. As time passes, the current strength of the elements changes. After some time of operation, its value decreases to the level at which the construction element is not able to transfer accidental overloads occurring during operation. Such a situation may lead to the destruction of a particular element or even the entire structure, leading to a catastrophe. If failure has not occurred yet, the crack propagates until the value of the structure’s current strength decreases to the level at which the nominal load of the element leads to its destruction. In practice, this means that every construction element of the structure has a period of safe operation, in which the probability of catastrophic failure should be kept as low as possible.

To this end, experimental research and numerical analyses have been conducted for many years to obtain concrete composites with the highest fracture toughness. Recently, material modification of concrete with mineral additives and chemical admixtures, as well as nanomaterials (e.g., nanosilica) has gained special development. More and more advanced techniques are also used to detect and analyze the development of cracks in the material, e.g., the digital image correlation method (DIC), acoustic emission (AE), and computed tomography (CT). The increasingly advanced modeling of fracture processes in composites with brittle matrixes (e.g., using the X-FEM method) allows a more in-depth understanding of fracture processes occurring in the material structure, especially at the interfaces of the composite.

Therefore, it is my pleasure to invite you to submit a manuscript for this Special Issue mainly focused on novel materials that modify the structure of concrete to improve its fracture toughness, and new devices and measuring techniques for analyzing cracks in concrete. Articles on modeling cracks in concrete will also be appreciated, as well as publications related to the assessment of the microstructure of damaged composites.

Moreover, I would like to invite authors of papers which analyze cracking processes in real structures, e.g., historic ones, whose aim is to assess and improve the durability of existing buildings.

The topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Linear and nonlinear fracture mechanics in the description of the fracture processes of Concrete composites and concrete structures;
• Mechanisms of concrete cracking at the macro, micro and nano scale;
• Cracking of concrete and concrete structures in complex stress conditions;
• Cracking of concrete and concrete structures as a result of dynamic loads;
• Improvement of fracture toughness of concrete as a result of using materials modification;
• Influence of high and low temperatures on fracture processes in concrete;
• The impact of the environment and corrosive factors on the development of cracks in concrete;
• Experimental methods in fracture mechanics of concrete composites and other materials;
• Modeling of fracture processes;
• The role of contact layers in the process of developing cracks in the composites;
• The use of nanotechnology to improve the fracture toughness of materials;
• Forecasting and analysis cracks in existing structures.

Prof. Grzegorz Ludwik Golewski
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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