Rheology of composites research group

Research classification (Frascati)
Head of the research group
Doctoral students
Keyword
mechanics of materials
fiber concrete
fiber orientations
computational rheology
image analysis
3D visualization
Overview
The competences of the group have a broadrange, from constitutive theory over numericalcomputer simulations and image analysis tovirtual reality visualization of scientific data.The main research topic is concerned with themechanical properties of composites containingshort fibres. The core application is steel fibrereinforced concrete, a construction material, theuse of which is gaining momentum in the building industry. The mechanical properties largelydepend on the orientation of short fibres, whichin turn are influenced by the production processof the structural parts made of fibre concrete. Inparticular, the flow of the fresh concrete mass,which is mixed with the fibres, determines thefibre orientations. Analysis of fibre orientationsin experiment samples is done by x-ray computed tomography, fibre orientations are thenextracted from the tomography. The group hasdeveloped its own software for this purpose. Theproduction process of concrete parts, in particular the casting, is simulated using computationalfluid dynamics (CFD) coupled to an orientationequation. Further, simulations of bending testsand split tests are performed with particle baseddiscrete element simulations. On the theoreticalside, the group has developed constitutive modelsfor the influence of the fibre orientations distribution on the mechanical and thermal propertiesof fibre concrete.This involves the research on stereoscopicsemi-immersive 3D visualization (virtual reality), which is conducted on the self-developed“Kyb3” system. The main task of the system isthe visualization of the computed tomography offibre concrete and CFD simulations. It is usedto visually inspect measurement and simulationresults.
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