This letter describes a newly discovered phenomenon: ductile fracture in cementitious materials. The brittle nature of materials such as concrete and ceramics has prompted the development of various approaches to enhance their fracture toughness. Fibre reinforcement has been the common focus in the toughening of the brittle materials. Two types of fracture have been observed to date in cementit...

We consider crack propagation in brittle non-linear elastic materials in the context of quasi-static evolutions of energetic type. Given a sequence of self-similar domains nΩ on which the imposed boundary conditions scale according to Bažant’s law, we show, in agreement with several experimental data, that the corresponding sequence of evolutions converges (for n → ∞) to the evolution of a crac...

Quasi-brittle materials such as concrete suffer from cracks during their life cycle, requiring great cost for conventional maintenance or replacement. In the last decades, self-healing materials are developed which are capable of filling and healing the cracks and regaining part of the stiffness and strength automatically after getting damaged, bringing the possibility of maintenance-free mater...

The objective of this investigation was to determine the quasi-static indentation response and failure mode in three-dimensional (3D) printed trapezoidal core structures, and to characterize the energy absorbed by the structures. In this work, the trapezoidal sandwich structure was designed in the following two ways. Firstly, the trapezoidal core along with its facesheet was 3D printed as a sin...

The aim of the present paper is a systematic elaboration of a three dimensional finite element analysis tool for discontinuous fracture in brittle solids. Brittle or quasi-brittle fracture usually occurs when a material reaches the limit of its strength and no plastic deformation has been observed prior to failure. In this novel approach, this kind of failure is characterized by three sets of g...

Free discontinuity problems arising in the variational theory for fracture mechanics are considered.AΓ -convergence proof for an r-adaptive 3Dfinite element discretization is given in the case of a brittle material. The optimal displacement field, crack pattern and mesh geometry are obtained through a variational procedure that encompasses both mechanical and configurational forces. Possible ex...