This paper mainly focuses on revealing the hydration mechanism of new cementitious material of filling body through its microstructure analysis. According to the SEM samples preparation, analysis of different age of filling body microstructure and XRD diffraction mapping, the results showed that the hydration products were with large amount of ettringite, followed by C-S-H gel, calcium and silica. The main reason of strength increasing was the ettringite morphology and the hydration process. It was obtained that the hydration products of different activators were mainly the influence factor of strength, on basis of analyzing the microstructure of different activator materials.

The periodically distributed fracture spacing phenomenon exists in the failure process of the reinforced concrete prism under uniaxial tension. In this paper, A numerical code RFPA3D (3D Realistic Failure Process Analysis) is used to simulate the three-dimensional failure process of plain concrete prism specimen and reinforced concrete prism specimen under uniaxial tension. The reinforced concrete is represented by a set of elements with same size and different mechanical properties. They are uniform cubic elements and their mechanical properties, including elastic modulus and peak strength, are distributed through the specimens according to a certain statistical distribution. The elastic modulus and other mechanical properties are weakened gradually when the stresses in the elements meet the specific failure criterion. The displacement-controlled loading scheme is used to simulate the complete failure process of reinforced concrete. The analyses focus on the failure mechanisms of the concrete and reinforcement. The complete process of the fracture for the plain concrete prism and the fracture initiation, infilling and saturation of the reinforced concrete prism is reproduced. It agrees well with the theoretical analysis. Through 3D numerical tests for the specimen, it can be investigated the interaction between the reinforcement and concrete mechanical properties in meso-level and the numerical code is proved to be an effective way to help thoroughly understand the rule of the reinforcement and concrete and also help the design of the structural concrete components and systems.

Six types of numerical specimens containing two notches are set up to numerically investigate the effect of element size on rock shear strength and failure pattern using RFPA2D (rock failure process analysis) code. These specimens are of the same geometrical dimension 180 mm×180 mm and have been discretized into 61×61, 122×122, 183×183, 244×244, 305×305, and 366×366 elements.The width of notches is about 2.95 (180/61) mm and the length is 45mm. The specimens are placed in a direct shear box. A lateral confining pressure with a value of 0.15MPa is invariably loaded in the vertical direction and an increasing horizontal displacement with 0.002mm/step is applied in the horizontal direction. The whole shear failure progress and associated stress field for the specimens are visually represented. Results show that the crack propagation is mostly influenced by the stress field in the vicinity of the notch tip, the required element size would be necessary in order to obtain good results. In general, for a coarse mesh, the stress field close to the notch tip can’t be represented accurately and shear strength obtained by such discretisation is slightly higher than the accurate value. For a fine mesh, the notch tip spreads through a relatively large number of elements and the stress field in vicinity of notch tip is well represented by the finite element approximation, therefore the failure pattern is consistent with real physical fracture mode.

The failure of rock mass under loading is resulting from preexisting flaws, such as cracks, pores and other defects. However, the propagation and coalescence mechanism among multi-group cracks is still a puzzle, especially to the engineering rocks in site. In this study, the failure of rock samples with two groups of preexisting parallel cracks under the axial load were numerically investigated by the Rock Failure Process Analysis code (RFPA) from a mechanics point of view. The simulated results reproduce the rock failure process: at the first loading stage, the particle is stressed and energy is stored as elastic strain energy with a few randomly isolated fractures. As the load increases, the isolated fractures are localized to form a macroscopic crack. At the peak load, the isolated fractures unstably propagate in a direction parallel to the loading direction following tortuous paths and with numerous crack branches. Finally, the major crack passes through the rock sample and several coarse progeny cracks are formed. Moreover, in the vicinity of the contacting zone the local crushing is always induced to cause fines. On the base of the simulated results, it is found that the dominant breakage mechanisms are catastrophic splitting and progressive crushing. It is pointed out that the particle breakage behavior strongly depends on the heterogeneous material property, the irregular shape and size, and the various loading conditions. Because of heterogeneity, the crack propagates in tortuous path and crack branching becomes a usual phenomenon. The failure process of rock sample demonstrated that due to the high stress concentration at the cracks tip or some weaker strength elements which are not on the cracks surface initiate some micro-fractures, those cracks and fractures may gradually become larger and larger, more and more with the progress of loading so that join into the branch cracks leading to the rock failure in the end. Not only did the output of the numerical simulation study compare well with the experiment results, but also the further insights of the mechanism of cracks propagation and coalescence process in rock mass were obtained.

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