Over 10 billion tons of concrete are produced for the construction industry every year, making concrete the second most used substance on Earth, only surpassed by water. With such high importance as a building material, there is significant need for the ability to accurately model concrete behavior. As a quasi-brittle...
Although cementitious construction materials are mainly used in a large scale and in huge quantities, fundamental properties such as strength, ductility, creep, shrinkage, and fracture behavior depend, to a great extent, on structural elements and phenomena which are effective at the micro- and nanoscale. This research involves characterization of the...
Microbiological dating of a crack's age depends upon establishing a viable method of sampling biomass from surfaces. Age is based upon the hypothesis that the amount of biomass on a given crack surface is proportional to the time that has passed since the surface was exposed. Presented herein is the...