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From Concrete Mixture to Structural Design - An Optimization Framework to Reduce the Global Warming Potential
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Concrete has a long history in the construction industry and is currently one of the most widely used building materials. Unfortunately, the concrete industry has a significant impact on the environment by contributing to about 9% of the total anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions [1]. Concrete is a highly complex composite material. However, the main source of concrete's GHG emissions is the cement [2]. This leads to two main strategies when trying to reduce the environmental impact. The first is to reduce the cement within the concrete mix. This can be done by substituting it using additives or increasing the amount of aggregates. Usually this will lead to decreased material properties, like compressive strength or stiffness. The second option is to reduce the amount of required concrete by optimizing the topology of the structure. However, this might require higher compressive strength. In addition, there are other properties like to workability which need to be considered. All in all, this leads to a highly complex optimization problem, which requires the estimation of effective concrete properties, based on the mixture as input to a predictive simulation. We present an automated workflow framework which combines experimental data with simulations, calibrates the simulation and performs the desired optimization. This workflow includes classical FE models [3, 4], design guidelines based on model codes, as well as data driven methods. The chosen example is a beam, for which the concrete mixture is optimized to reduce GHG emissions. The first step is an estimation of material parameters, based on experimental data. This includes measures of stochastic distribution, allowing the quantification of the quality of the estimated parameters. The second step is the optimization. It takes into account constraints like the loading capacity after 28 days, the maximum allowed temperature during cement hydration and the maximum time till demoulding. The applied models include a Mori-Tanaka-based homogenization method to estimate effective concrete parameters, an FE simulation including the evolution of the concrete compressive strength and stiffness, the temperature field, displacements, and stress. This research shows a way towards a more performance-oriented material design.