Chemo-mechanical coupling behaviour of leached concrete: Part II: Modelling

The paper is concerned with a coupled chemo-mechanical model describing the interaction between the calcium leaching and the mechanical damage in concrete materials. On the one hand, the phenomenological chemistry is described by the nowadays well-known simplified calcium leaching approach. It is based on the dissolution–diffusion process together with the chemical equilibrium relating the calcium concentration of the solid's skeleton and the calcium in the pore solution. For concrete, a homogenization approach using asymptotic expansions is used to take into account the influence of the presence of the aggregates leading to an equivalent homogeneous medium. On the other hand, the continuum damage mechanics is used to describe the mechanical degradation of concrete. The modelling accounts for the fact that concrete becomes more and more ductile as the leaching process grows. The model also predicts the inelastic irreversible deformation as damage evolves. The growth of inelastic strains observed during the mechanical tests is described by means of an elastoplastic-like model. The coupled nonlinear problem at hand is addressed within the context of the finite element method. And finally, numerical simulations are compared with the experimental results of first part of this work.