Towards understanding deformation and fracture in cementitious lattice materials: Insights from multiscale experiments and simulations

Tailoring lattice structures is a commonly used method to develop lattice materials with desired mechanical properties. However, for cementitious lattice materials, besides the macroscopic lattice structure, the multi-phase microstructure of cement paste may have substantial impact on the mechanical responses. Therefore, this work proposes a multi-scale numerical modelling method to simulate the deformation and fracture behavior of cementitious lattice materials, such that the influence of cement paste microstructure can be properly captured. On the microscale, the load–displacement response of cement paste is numerically simulated then experimentally validated. In order to rationally investigate the role of cement paste microstructure, the obtained load–displacement response was then formulated to several types of model inputs reflecting different degree of brittleness. These inputs were then used for simulating the mechanical response of macroscale cementitious lattices. By comparing the simulation to experiment, multi-linear behavior (ML) was found to an appropriate method to include the realistic pre-critical cracking and post-peak softening of cement paste in the model. Compared to ideally brittle behavior, using ML as input, the discrepancy between simulated and experimentally tested fracture energy decreases from 37.4% to 12.4%. In addition, the influence of lattice structure on the strength of cementitious lattices was also accurately captured by the proposed model. Randomized cementitious lattice has 21.6% (22.0% from simulation) lower strength than regular lattice. Moreover, the influence of fracture criterion of the proposed model is discussed and elaborated. Owning to the high simulation accuracy, the proposed multi-scale method in this work could be helpful for tailoring the fracture cementitious lattice materials for future studies.