Modeling of concrete’s meso-structure by phase-field method and its application to numerical experiment

This paper proposes a method for modeling three-dimensional (3D) concrete’s meso-structure composed of mortar and coarse aggregates. The method consists of an automatic generation of coarse aggregates and their random arrangement in concrete’s domain. The phase-field method is applied to generate large number of coarse aggregates, each of which has arbitrary 3D shape. The aggregates are arranged randomly in concrete’s domain by repeating trial-and-error calculation with random numbers. After explaining the modeling procedure, several numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the validity and availability of the proposed method. First, the comparison of meso-scale model with an actual concrete verifies the validity of the method. The availability is then demonstrated by generating concrete’s meso-scale models with various grain size distributions. Finally, the application to a numerical experiment reveals that the proposed method allows the simulation of 3D crack propagation behavior in concrete’s meso-scale.