Representative Volume Element Based Modeling of Cementitious Materials

The current work focuses on evaluation of the effective elastic properties of cementitious materials through a voxel based finite element analysis (FEA) approach. Voxels are generated for a heterogeneous cementitious material (type-I cement) consisting of typical volume fractions of various constituent phases from digital microstructures. The microstructure is modeled as a microscale representative volume element (RVE) in ABAQUS (R) to generate cubes several tens of microns in dimension and subjected to various prescribed deformation modes to generate the effective elastic tensor of the material. The RVE-calculated elastic properties such as moduli and Poisson's ratio are validated through an asymptotic expansion homogenization (AEH) and compared with rule of mixtures. Both periodic (PBC) and kinematic boundary conditions (KBC) are investigated to determine if the elastic properties are invariant due to boundary conditions. In addition, the method of Windowing was used to assess the randomness of the constituents and to validate how the isotropic elastic properties were determined. The average elastic properties obtained from the displacement based FEA of various locally anisotropic microsize cubes extracted from an RVE of size 100 x 100 x 100 mu m showed that the overall RVE response was fully isotropic. The effects of domain size, degree of hydration (DOH), kinematic and periodic boundary conditions, domain sampling techniques, local anisotropy, particle size distribution (PSD), and random microstructure on elastic properties are studied.