Modeling and Experimental Identification of Cracks in Porous Materials During Drying

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to mathematically describe and experimentally determine the self-fracturing of fluid-saturated porous materials during drying processes. The thermo-hydro-mechanical model of drying that is suitable for a mathematical description of these phenomena as well as the acoustic emission (AE) technique for their experimental detection are presented. Numerical solutions based on the thermo-hydro-mechanical drying model are used to analyze stress development and to formulate the crack criterion in dried material. The studies concern the convective drying of kaolin-clay material. Bar-shaped samples with a rectangular cross-section were used for the mechanical tests and cylindrically shaped samples of kaolin-clay were used for the drying tests. Good agreement of the theoretical predictions to the experimental data is shown.

Keywords:

• Acoustic emission
• Cracking
• Drying
• Experimental
• Kaolin-clay
• Modeling

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work was carried out as part of the research project N N209 104337 sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.