Mesoscale damage modelling of concrete by using image-based scaled boundary finite element method

Abstract

As a thin layer surrounding aggregates, the interfacial transition zone (ITZ) has a significant influence on the mechanical performance of concrete, a large number of small elements is required to discretize the ITZ and its vicinity owing to its small thickness. In this contribution, the mesostructure of concrete is explicitly built by a novel method named improved random walking algorithm (IRWA), with which the grading, content, shape of aggregates and the thickness of ITZs, can be conveniently controlled by users, and high volume fraction of aggregate and remarkable efficiency can be achieved. In the framework of the scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM), the image-based quadtree decomposition is employed to automatically generate the multi-level mesh for the concrete composites, with no trouble in dealing with hanging nodes or the dramatically changing element size in the vicinity of the material interface. The nonlocal damage model in integral format is extended to simulate progressive damage of concrete at mesoscale with good mesh independence. Four benchmarks are modelled to demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach, and the effects of model parameters on the structural responses are also discussed.