Micromechanical investigation for the probabilistic behaviorof unsaturated concrete

Abstract

There is an inherent randomness for concrete microstructure even with the same manufacturing process. Meanwhile, the concrete material under the aqueous environment is usually not fully saturated by water. This study aimed to develop a stochastic micromechanical framework to investigate the probabilistic behavior of the unsaturated concrete from microscale level. The material is represented as a multiphase composite composed of the water, the pores and the intrinsic concrete (made up by the mortar, the coarse aggregates and their interfaces). The differential scheme based two-level micromechanical homogenization scheme is presented to quantitatively predict the concrete\'s effective properties. By modeling the volume fractions and properties of the constituents as stochastic, we extend the deterministic framework to stochastic to incorporate the material\'s inherent randomness. Monte Carlo simulations are adopted to reach the different order moments of the effective properties. A distribution-free method is employed to get the unbiased probability density function based on the maximum entropy principle. Numerical examples including limited experimental validations, comparisons with existing micromechanical models, commonly used probability density functions and the direct Monte Carlo simulations indicate that the proposed models provide an accurate and computationally efficient framework in characterizing the material\'s effective properties. Finally, the effects of the saturation degrees and the pore shapes on the concrete macroscopic probabilistic behaviors are investigated based on our proposed stochastic micromechanical framework.