Abstract
The adoption of composites has been successful in manufacturing industries and is rapidly expanding into civil infrastructure. One challenge to the broader adoption is a limited ability to model the synergistic effects of the combined physical/chemical processes of environmental exposure and mechanical loading. Unlike other building materials, long-term field-performance-data of polymer composites in construction applications does not exist. The first composite building system in the USA is the facade of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), completed in 2015. Since phenomenological service life models for composite building applications are not available, it is crucial to build multi-physical-based models in order to predict composite service life performance on a centennial time scale. This study begins to understand the thermo-chemical-mechanical degradation mechanisms of composite materials at multiple length scales. The framework is computationally modeled using COMSOL \(^\circledR \) using geometries and element properties that are provided by the manufacturer of the SFMOMA facade.
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