Mechanics of Fracture in Layered Architected Materials

This talk asks the role of mechanics of materials, particularly fracture mechanics in design and engineering civil infrastructure materials. Concrete, a quasi-brittle material is the backbone of the civil infrastructure. Decades of research on engineering and fracture mechanics of concrete led by the hundreds of pioneering works of great scholars, have helped us understand mechanism of crack initiation and propagation in heterogeneous materials. However, there remain a significant need to continue understand mechanics of damage in conventional and novel heterogeneous infrastructure materials. Growth in automation and robotics (e.g., 3D-printing), innovative cementitious composite materials (e.g., architected material), and numerical frameworks (e.g., coupled and multi-physics) have enabled us to expand on the design domain and performance characteristics. Here, we highlight how revisiting fundamental frameworks for representing heterogeneity via proposed statistical mechanics methods and developing computational algorithms through coupled phase-field and cohesive zone model can help understand fracture in layered and architected materials and design for it.