Mesoscopic modeling of the impact behavior and fragmentation of porous concrete

This study presents the numerical analyses conducted to investigate the impact behavior of different porous concretes, which have also been cast and tested experimentally. For a realistic representation of the real porous concretes containing arbitrary shaped air pores, a mesh generation code was developed in which the aggregates in the mixtures were directly extracted through computed tomography. In the code, mineralogically different aggregates in porous concretes with gravel could also be individually defined. In the explicit finite element analyses conducted, porous concrete was considered as a four-phase material, consisting of aggregates, interfacial transition zones (ITZ), bulk cement paste and air. The pore size distribution and the fragmentation behavior of the concretes were also numerically analyzed. Among the parameters that have been investigated both numerically and experimentally, aggregate grading, which determines the porosity and pore size distribution of the material, was found to have a dominant effect on the strength as well as the fragmentation properties of porous concretes. Although the amount of ITZ is higher in mixtures containing finer aggregates, those mixtures had higher impact strengths compared to coarser aggregate ones again owing to their much finer pore structures.