Tertiary creep in concrete

Time dependent concrete fracture is simulated using a rate type creep model coupled with a discrete concrete model. The numerical study uses experimental data, of various tests, three point bending, relaxation, tensile, performed on concrete. This contribution demonstrates the capability of the model to capture the time dependent fracture behavior of concrete, and predicts the critical time of failure

Positional Preferences and Efficient Capital Accumulation when Households Exhibit a Preference for Wealth

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Oxford Economic Papers following peer review. The version of record Sugata Ghosh, Ronald Wendner, Positional preferences and efficient capital accumulation when households exhibit a preference for wealth, Oxford Economic Papers, Volume 70, Issue 1, January 2018, Pages 114–140 is available online at: https://academic.oup.com/oep/article-abstract/70/1/114/3859839

Crack healing under sustained load in concrete: An experimental/numerical study

The need of sustainable resilient structures and infrastructures push towards the use of cementitious materials able to heal micro-cracks and defects. For real structural application under service loading the time-dependent behavior is of the utmost importance, especially in presence of cracks which can lead to a nonlinear creep behavior that might cause the structural failure. Now the new challenge is to study and quantify the effect of crack-healing on the nonlinear creep behavior. This study aims at the following goals: 1) to characterize with experimental investigations the effect of the healing in tests in which the specimens, along the exposure time and under controlled environmental conditions, are under sustained load, the expected service load, determined as a fraction of the pre-cracking load; 2) develop a comprehensive numerical framework for the interpretation and simulation of the experimentally observed results. To this purpose an experimental investigation is currently ongoing at Politecnico di Milano with reference to an Ultra High-Performance Concrete developed in the framework of the H2020 ReSHEALience project for exposure to extremely aggressive environments. The numerical framework is based on the recent developments of the multiphysics lattice particle model