Researchers used robotics and additive manufacturing to toughen cement-based material with precisely placed hollow tubes. The result is more than 5 times tougher than counterparts.
Inspired by the architecture of human bone's tough outer layer, engineers at Princeton have developed a cement-based material that is 5.6 times more damage-resistant than standard counterparts. The bio-inspired design allows the material to resist cracking and avoid sudden failure, unlike conventional, brittle cement-based counterparts., the research team led by Reza Moini, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, and Shashank Gupta, a third-year Ph.D.
Moini said the key to the improvement lies in the purposeful design of internal architecture, by balancing the stresses at the crack front with the overall mechanical response. The team's bio-inspired design incorporates cylindrical and elliptical tubes within the cement paste that interact with propagating cracks.
"What makes this stepwise mechanism unique is that each crack extension is controlled, preventing sudden, catastrophic failure," said Gupta."Instead of breaking all at once, the material withstands progressive damage, making it much tougher." The researchers said the new framework provides a more accurate representation of the material's arrangements, moving towards a spectrum from ordered to random, beyond the simple binary classifications of periodic and non-periodic. Moini said that the study makes a distinction with approaches that confuse irregularity and perturbation with statistical disorder such as Voronoi tessellation and perturbation methods.
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