Landslides are one of the main natural threats for both people and infrastructure in mountainousregions. In most cases, landslides are triggered by the loss of cohesion in a soil due to the increasingwater saturation level after long or intense rainfalls. Only little is known on the triggering of failuresat the microscopic scale due to the limited experimental accessibility and ...

The dependence relation between the macroscopic effective property and the microstructure of interpenetrating multiphase composites is investigated in this paper. The effective elastic moduli of such composites cannot be calculated from conventional micromechanics methods based on Eshelby s tensor because an interpenetrating phase cannot be extracted as dispersed inclusions. Employing the conce...

The discrete element method constitutes a general class of modeling techniques to simulate the microscopic behavior (i.e., at the particle scale) of granular/soil materials. We present a contact dynamics method, accounting for the cohesive nature of fine powders and soils. A modification of the model adjusted to capture the essential physical processes underlying the dynamics of generation and ...

This paper proposes a semi-numerical model providing accurate estimates for the mechanical behaviour of viscoelastic microcracked masonry. It relies on two steps. The first one approximates creep mortar by coupling - in Laplace-Carson symbolic space Griffith's theory to Ponte-Castañeda & Willis (PCW) micromechanical scheme accounting microcracks interactions and spatial distribution. PCW is an ...

The presented work depicts results of a two-scale approach to the problem of damage and failure prediction on laminated composite structures. Modeling on the micro-level has enabled insight into the underlying physical processes which lead to homogenized properties of the macro-scale material. In this work, micromechanical analysis has been performed by application of the High Fidelity Generali...

Damage constitutive models based on micromechanical formulation and combination of micromechanical and macromechanical effects are presented to predict progressive damage in aligned and random fiber reinforced composites. To estimate the overall elastoplastic damage responses, an effective yield criterion is derived based on the ensemble-volume averaging process and the first-order effects of e...

The gradual evolution of the material properties of a cement-based material, i.e. the stiffness of cement paste, is the result of the continuous change of the microstructure with the progress of the hydration process. Based on an existing micromechanical model for the simulation of the shear and elastic modulus of cement paste, this paper is orientated to experimentally determine the structure ...