Simulation of fresh concrete slump test with the Material Point Method

Resumo

The exponential growth in computational power in recent years has increasingly made numerical simulations a go-to tool for studying the behavior of structures and materials. A pertinent application is the simulation of the fresh concrete slump test, a laboratory test used to study the consistency and mobility of the concrete mixture. However, this simulation presents a challenge, as concrete — composed of a varied mixture of materials like water, cement, sand, and gravel — exhibits viscoplastic behavior. Therefore, a robust numerical method that models this physical nonlinearity is necessary. Previous works have successfully simulated the fresh concrete slump test as a Herschel-Bulkley fluid, utilizing the lattice Boltzmann method. Meanwhile, the Generalized Interpolation Material Point (GIMP) method is gaining traction in the industry. GIMP unites the best traits of mesh-based methods with the best traits of particle-based methods, by combining a fixed background grid of finite elements (i.e., a grid that remains still throughout the simulation) with material points where the kinematic data is stored. This approach favors the simulation of large displacements and deformations. In this work, GIMP is adopted to numerically simulate the fresh concrete slump test with the Herschel-Bulkley model.