A computational setting of calcium leaching in concrete and its coupling with continuum damage mechanics

We present in this work a coupled phenomenological chemo-mechanical model that represents the degradation of concrete-like materials. The chemical behaviour is described by the nowadays well known simplified calcium leaching approach. And the mechanical damage behaviour is described by a continuum damage model which involves the gradient of the damage quantity. The coupled nonlinear problem at hand is addressed within the context of the finite element method. For the equation governing the calcium dissolution-diffusion part of the problem, special care is taken to treat the highly nonlinear calcium conductivity and solid calcium functions. The algorithmic design is based on a Newton-type iterative scheme where use is made of a recently proposed relaxed linearization procedure. And for the equation governing the damage part of the problem, an augmented Lagrangian formulation is used to take into account the damage irreversibility constraint. Finally, numerical simulations are compared with experimental results on cement paste.