Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2021
Volume 66, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 15–19, 2021; Virtual; Time Zone: Central Daylight Time, USA
Session X09: Bio-mineralization, Hydration & Hardening in Colloidal Gels: Building Solid Materials out of Soft Gels
8:00 AM–11:00 AM,
Friday, March 19, 2021
Sponsoring
Unit:
DSOFT
Chair: Niels Holton Andersen, MIT; Thibaut Divoux, MSE
Abstract: X09.00004 : A quantitative approach to biomineralization and cement hydration, guided by (micro-)structural mechanics
9:48 AM–10:24 AM
Live
Presenter:
Christian Hellmich
(Civil and Environmental Engineering, TU Wien - Vienna University of Technology)
Author:
Christian Hellmich
(Civil and Environmental Engineering, TU Wien - Vienna University of Technology)
In this context, we have followed an approach rooted in the rich tradition of continuum mechanics, which is the basis for state-of-the-art design of buildings, and extended it towards complex hierarchical micro and nanostructures, thereby establishing links to materials science, physics, chemistry, and biology. In other words, micro and nanostructural building blocks and the "universal" patterns they build up within material systems (such as hydrating cement or bone) were linked, via continuum poro-micro-mechanical principles, to the scale-dependent mechanical properties (poro-elasticity, viscoelasticity, plasticity/strength) governing the material behavior. The same structural patterns, when put into an X-ray physics framework, satisfactorily predicted diffraction data. This provided a new level of rigour and reliability in the field of "structure-property-relations"; but surprisingly, it also sharpened the eye for the evolution of the material systems, such as biomineralization of bone [9] or hydration of cement.
Conclusively, bone, at the ultrastructural level, appears as a hydrated nano-composite of aligned mineralized collagen fibrils embedded into a porous polycrystalline matrix, with the fluid-to-solid phase transitions taking place under closed thermodynamic conditions, while cement paste appears as a foam of hydration products transgressing the space between unhydrated clinker grains, with the total pore space between the fundamental blocks of hydrates (solid calcium-silicate hydrates) driving the continuous densification and hardening of the system.
References:
Frontiers in Physics 6, 125, 2018
J Theor Biol 335, 185-197, 2013
Cem Concr Res 87, 170-183, 2016
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