MECHANICS OF QUASI-BRITTLE MATERIALS
XUANDE CHEN
Visiting Scholar of Civil Engineering, Northwestern University;
Ph.D. Candidate of Civil Engineering, Laval University, Canada.
Overview
Xuande is a second-year PhD candidate in Civil Engineering at the Department of Civil and Water Engineering of Laval University (Canada, Quebec) and is currently working within Prof. Cusatis’ Research Group at Northwestern University as a visiting scholar, from August 2018 to February 2019.
Xuande received his bachelor’s degree at Wuhan University in China and his master’s degree of Engineering specialized in Civil Works at École Spéciale des Travaux Publics, du Bâtiment et de l’Industrie (ESTP Paris) in France, and then received another master’s degree of science in Materials and Structures at École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay (France).
Links
Northwestern Civil & Environmental Engineering
Center for Sustainable Engineering of Geological and Infrastructure Materials
Department of Civil and Water Engineering, Laval University
Cusatis Group Research
Discrete Modeling of concrete corrosion under Thermal-Hydro-Electro-Mechanical coupling effects
Reinforced concrete infrastructures corrosion due to chloride penetration has always been a major issue in submarine areas as well as extreme cold regions where deicing salts are used frequently. The study focuses on numerical modeling of this physical process at laboratory scale by using the diffusion framework developed in Lattice-Discrete-Particle-Model to present high heterogeneity and porosity of concrete specimens. Also integrated with an explicit coupling scheme between moisture diffusion and pore vapor pressure, the discrete diffusion network helps to gain a better understanding when representing diffusion problems coupled with multiple fields. More work remains to be done to extend its ability for simulating movement of chloride solution through the specimen (scheme of accelerated chloride migration test) while an external voltage is applied. The results could be meaningful in order to analyze and predict chloride penetration profile in real-life industrial problems.
Evaluation of Ultra-High-Performance-Concrete external layer in repairing cracking concrete samples in terms of permeability to chloride penetration
Ultra-High-Performance-Concrete (UHPC) is a class of concrete defined by its exceptionally high strength and durability and has been widely utilized in Europe for specialized applications that demand superior strength and corrosion resistance. By setting up diffusion and migration test on repaired cracking concretes, our objective is to evaluate this UHPC external layer’s capacity in increasing concrete specimen’s resistance to corrosion, both experimentally and numerically.