Application of Elastic-Damage-Heal Model for Self-Healing Concrete Thick-Walled Cylinders Through Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes

Abstract

Elastic-damage-heal models are used for a phenomenological study of self-healing materials. Self-healing materials are a class of smart materials that have a structural capability to recover damage caused by environmental stimuli over time. In this paper, a semi-analytic modeling for self-healing concrete thick-walled cylinders is presented. For this purpose, an elastic-damage-heal model through thermodynamics of irreversible processes, in the framework of continuum damage-healing mechanic is used. This model uses stress spectral decomposition method to model the different behavior of concrete in tensile and compressive loadings. Gibbs potential energy is divided into three parts: elastic energy, damage energy and healing energy. In this regard, the model introduces damage and healing surfaces to detect damage and healing behaviors from the elastic one. We derive an analytical closed-form solution for a self-healing concrete thick-walled cylinder. The verification of the model is shown by solving an example. Finally, a parametric study on the healing parameters of the self-healing concrete thick-walled cylinder is performed to demonstrate the capability of the model. It is noted that for a case with the specified values of healing parameters, the tangential stress level in an internal radius of thick-walled self-healing cylinder is more than tripled off a thick-walled nonself-healing cylinder.