Resilience in Geomechanics: Assessment of Physico-chemical Degradation of Geomaterials
Tomasz Hueckel
Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Duke University
ABSTRACT: It is widely accepted that critical properties of geomaterials play a key role in failure of earth-structures undergo often a substantial evolution induced by non-mechanical processes and variables. These include hydro-thermal fracture, thermal collapse, chemical mass removal or accretion (dissolution or precipitation), chemical shrinkage/swelling, drying shrinkage, capillary force evolution during pore water phase change. Resilience engineering strives to ensure that buildings, structures, and infrastructure are able to absorb damage induced by a combined long-term persistent (environmental) exposure and a short-term extreme adverse event, without suffering complete failure and with an intrinsic capability to restore (at least) the critical functions. Hueckel presents a review of several phenomena leading to geomaterial degradation, and a modeling methodology deal with multi-physical couplings in constitutive modeling. In plasticity, the central constitutive function is a hardening rule. Also in this case, phenomenological observations indicate a chemo-mechanical, two-way coupling. Other degradation phenomena discussed include drying – cracking and or the role of suction induced hardening in unsaturated materials.
