Given that concrete masonry walls are expected to experience shrinkage combined with thermal expansion and contraction, and in some cases even carbonation, throughout their service life, cracking is to be expected. However, after concrete masonry walls have been placed into service, originally anticipated and accounted for cracking is often misdiagnosed as a structural defect. Such misdiagnoses...

We report the thermally induced unconventional cracking of graphene to generate zigzag edges. This crystallography-selective cracking was observed for as-grown graphene films immediately following the cooling process subsequent to chemical vapor deposition (CVD) on Cu foil. Results from Raman spectroscopy show that the crack-derived edges have smoother zigzag edges than the chemically formed gr...

A number of studies have indicated that the tension-stiffening law is an important input parameter in a numerical analysis of serviceability (deformations and cracking) problems of reinforced concrete (RC) structures. The stochastic nature of concrete cracking, which results in a large scatter of experimental results, renders the constitutive modeling a very difficult task. Even data obtained f...

Desiccation cracking and its implications will be more of an issue due to the global warming trends. Soils tend to shrink when they lose moisture. In particular, fine-grained soils are susceptible to shrinkage and the resulting volume change. Shrinkage can cause cracking of soils that can adversely impact the engineering properties and behavior of the soils. As a result, the integrity of struct...

Metallic cast components inevitably contain defects such as shrinkage cavities which are inherent to the solidification process. Those defects are known to significantly alter the fatigue life of components. Yet very little is known, quantitatively, on the dangerosity of internal casting defects compared to surface ones. In this study, fatigue specimens containing controlled internal defects (s...

this paper identifies eleven types of asphalt pavement distress types, commonly occuring in tehran metropolitan area. of these, five distresses namely: corrugation; utility cut depression ;pot holes; alligator cracking; and loss of bridge deck surfacing are rather common. however, others namely: shear failure; shrinkage cracks; lane joint cracks; bleeding; and shoulder distress are less prevail...

This paper deals with the effect of drying as a moisture diffusion process in a segment of a typical box-girder bridge. Pore relative humidity distributions throughout the cross sections of the plates of the girder are calculated from the diffusion equation, taking its nonlinearity and aging into account. The effect of creep with aging on the stresses produced by drying shrinkage is taken into ...

The lack of durability in concrete repairs induces repair failures in field and endless “repair of repairs”. Most often drying shrinkage of “new” repair material restrained by “old” concrete substrate causes cracking in the repair material, combined with interface delamination between the repair and the concrete substrate, which may also introduce chlorides, oxygen, moisture, alkali or sulphate...