MCMB LAB’s New Project Supported by PA Department of Community and Economic Development

Prof. Najafi’s Manufacturing PA Innovation Program proposal entitled “Damage-tolerant Design of Ultra-High-Performance Cementitious Composite” has been awarded by the PA Department of Community and Economic Development. Inspired by the complex hierarchical architectures present in many biological structures, Prof. Najafi has teamed up with the TAKTL Company to investigate the fracture behavior of Ultra-High-Performance Cementitious (UHPC) composites to design damage-tolerant structural materials. Studying natural structural materials, which have been perfected over millions of years of evolution by tailoring hard and soft phases in intricate hierarchical architectures, offers a path towards designing lightweight cementitious composites with superior strength and toughness. To accomplish this, we will extract the essential design parameters from natural structures that control the fracture behavior and translate them to UHPC composites. In this 1-year single-PI project, we will utilize advanced computational tools to conduct a multiscale structural analysis by considering an accurate representation of microstructure features in A|UHPC panels. We will also study the fracture behavior of A|UHPC by employing novel damage models developed in the PI’s lab at Drexel University. Integrating our computational structural analysis tools with a bioinspired manufacturing framework will lead to a design approach for tailoring the architecture of UHPC at the mesoscale to enhance material toughness and strength simultaneously.