Numerical simulation of water transport in recycled concrete

Please check whether enrolling in this project is possible by directly contacting the responsible supervisor(s) indicated below as soon as possible. Note that although we announce many topics, we won't be able to offer all of them simultaneously due to limited lab capacity.

Demolition of concrete structures due to the end of service life or destroyed by wars may have a significant environmental impact if it cannot be reused for the circular economy. To reduce the environmental burden of demolished concrete, it is strongly recommended to reuse demolished concrete to produce new concrete. One of the common ways is to reuse the old concrete as recycled concrete aggregates (RCAs). Concrete made with RCAs is known as recycled concrete. However, due to the natural defects of RCAs (e.g., porous old mortar, wide interfacial transition zones), recycled concrete has lower durability than concrete with natural aggregates. To investigate the durability of recycled concrete, water transport, as an essential for many deuteriation processes, must be well understood.

To better understand how the presence of different types of RCAs can affect water transport, this project will perform numerical simulations on water transport. The numerical simulations will use the artificial and measured heterogeneous microstructures of recycled concrete (as the examples shown in the figures) as the simulation domains. Then, a water transport model will be used for water transport through these microstructures. Therefore, the effects of the different types of RCAs can be revealed. Simulation results will be compared and calibrated by experimental data measured in the previous projects and collected from the literature.

The student enrolling in this project will have the chance to learn various methods to perform numerical simulations (e.g., COMSOL Multiphysics), and model the process of water transport. Previous knowledge of mathematical modeling would be an advance.