Principal Investigator Oral Buyukozturk
In recent years, continuum and atomistic modeling of cementitious materials has provided significant advances towards studying the durability of civil infrastructure. An important frontier to understanding structure-property relationships is the “mesoscale”, which represents the bridge between underlying (e.g. molecular) processes and bulk macroscale behavior. This review highlights examples of a mesoscale approach within biological materials and emphasizes their applicability to the study and design of sustainable cement-based materials at multiple length scales. We propose a methodology focused on the coupling of computation and experiment for furthering our understanding of the microstructural properties that control the durability of hardened cement paste. Natural materials have shown that incorporating these design strategies at multiple discrete length scales lead to more durable materials by providing redundancy within their hierarchical structures. This opens exciting new opportunities to innovate cement-based materials by applying similar bioinspired approaches to engineer the material at multiple length scales and manipulate the self-assembly and setting processes.