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Workshop Rationale
The construction industry is under increasing pressure for delivering more sustainable “green” concrete as well as concrete with superior and multifunctional “smart” properties. As a result, cementitious materials are becoming increasingly more complex while the demands on the material are growing more rigorous. Though the engineering community knows how to formulate these materials based on empirical design approaches, their development requires extensive testing, resulting in large costs and thus limiting the construction industry’s ability to achieve innovative solutions.
Over the past two decades, advances in the development of mathematical models coupled with continually increasing computing power have provided scientists with the unprecedented opportunity to simulate complex behavior and model systems over many length and time scales, thus offering a promising avenue for improving and predicting the performance of concrete and providing new opportunities for the exploration and the development of novel cement-based materials with desired properties.
Nevertheless, given the highly heterogeneous and evolving character of cement-based materials and the high variability and complex spatial structures that span a hierarchy of length scales, the development of numerical algorithms for engineering the next generation of cementitious materials remains one of the most significant challenges that the cement and concrete community will face during the next decade.
Workshop Objectives
The objectives of this International US-Poland workshop are to: (1) critically review the state-of-the-art knowledge of computational modeling of cementitious materials from the atomistic to the macroscopic scales and (2) define the gaps currently missing to develop a comprehensive and predictive multiscale computational framework linking chemistry, microstructure, and mechanical properties across length and time scales for engineering the next generation of cementitious materials.
Specific questions to be addressed include short term research needs and implementation issues and longer term needs for developing a comprehensive and predictive multiscale computational framework linking chemistry, microstructure, and mechanical properties across length and time scales for engineering the next generation of cementitious materials
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