Fractal and Fractional in Construction Materials

A special issue of Fractal and Fractional (ISSN 2504-3110). This special issue belongs to the section "Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 September 2024 | Viewed by 361

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Interests: civil engineering; cement-based materials; non-destructive measurement; transportation property; microstructure and durability; fractal analysis; electrical property; cement; concrete; construction materials; microstructure
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
College of Materials Science and Engineering, Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, Xi’an 710055, China
Interests: civil engineering, concrete workability; mechanical property; crack resistance; durability; fiber-enhanced materials; Portland cement; mineral admixtures; fly ash; silica fume
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Construction materials, including concrete, cement mortar, asphalt, ferric metal, fiber-reinforced materials, bamboo, polymer, etc., have been widely used in civil engineering. In recent years, fractal theory has been widely adopted in many research fields, such as civil engineering and materials science to probe the origin of materials properties (such as rheology, permeability, diffusivity, and thermal transportation). Fractal geometry is a new branch of nonlinear science, proposed and fundamentally established in the 1970s, focusing on the irregularities as well as the haphazard phenomena and self-similarity in nature.

This Special Issue aims to collect the recent advances made in Fractal and Fractional in construction materials globally. The submitted manuscripts will be peer reviewed, and those accepted will be published in the open-access journal Fractal and Fractional. This issue will cover topics of interest that include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

  1. Fractal and fractional characterization of construction materials;
  2. Fractal and fractional combined with other theoretical, numerical, and/or experimental methods, in the evaluation of the mechanical performance of construction materials;
  3. Fractal approach to study the geotechnical engineering, cement-based materials, fiber-reinforced materials, rock and soil materials, geopolymer materials, asphalt and other materials for road pavements, and innovative sustainable materials;
  4. Fractal approach to study the properties such as transportation and durability, volume stability and mechanical properties, and cracks and fractures;
  5. Other fractal-based approaches used in construction materials.

Dr. Shengwen Tang
Dr. Lei Wang
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Fractal and Fractional is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • construction materials
  • fractal and fractional
  • mechanical performance
  • fractal theory
  • experiment
  • transportation
  • durability

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Review

45 pages, 10195 KiB  
Review
Fractal Analysis of Cement-Based Composite Microstructure and Its Application in Evaluation of Macroscopic Performance of Cement-Based Composites: A Review
by Peng Zhang, Junyao Ding, Jinjun Guo and Fei Wang
Fractal Fract. 2024, 8(6), 304; https://doi.org/10.3390/fractalfract8060304 - 21 May 2024
Viewed by 243
Abstract
Cement-based composites’, as the most widely used building material, macroscopic performance significantly influences the safety of engineering structures. Meanwhile, the macroscopic properties of cement-based composites are tightly related to their microscopic structure. The complexity of cement-based composites’ microscopic structure is challenging to describe [...] Read more.
Cement-based composites’, as the most widely used building material, macroscopic performance significantly influences the safety of engineering structures. Meanwhile, the macroscopic properties of cement-based composites are tightly related to their microscopic structure. The complexity of cement-based composites’ microscopic structure is challenging to describe geometrically, so fractal theory is extensively applied to quantify the microscopic structure of cement-based composites. However, existing studies have not clearly defined the quantification methods for various microscopic structures in CCs, nor have they provided a comprehensive evaluation of the correlation between the fractal dimensions of different microscopic structures and macroscopic performance. So, this study categorizes the commonly used testing methods in fractal theory into three categories: particle distribution (laser granulometry, etc.), pore structure (mercury intrusion porosity, etc.), and fracture (computed tomography, etc.). It systematically establishes a detailed process for the application of testing methods, the processing of test results, model building, and fractal dimension calculation. The applicability of different fractal dimension calculation models and the range of the same fractal dimension established by different models are compared and discussed, and the advantages and disadvantages of different models are analyzed. Finally, the research delves into an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the fractal dimension of cement-based composites’ microscopic structure and its macroscopic properties, such as compressive strength, corrosion resistance, impermeability, and high-temperature resistance. The principle that affects the positive and negative correlation between fractal dimension and macroscopic performance is discussed and revealed in this study. The comprehensive review in this paper provides scholars with methods and models for quantitative research on the microscopic structural parameters of cement-based composites and offers a pathway for the non-destructive assessment of the macroscopic performance of cement-based composites. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Fractal and Fractional in Construction Materials)
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