•A Discrete Approach to Concrete Fracture
Birgit Beckmann, Kai Schicktanz, Dirk Reischl and Manfred Curbach published a study in 2012 titled “DEM simulation of concrete fracture and crack evolution” in the journal Structural Concrete, issued by Wiley. The work appeared in volume 13, issue 4, spanning pages 213 to 220, and carries the DOI 10.1002/suco.201100036 with ISSN 1464-4177.
The study employed a discrete element method (DEM) to model how concrete fractures and how cracks evolve within the material. DEM treats a body as an assembly of distinct elements rather than a continuous medium, allowing fracture paths and crack propagation to emerge from the interactions between individual particles or blocks. The authors applied this approach specifically to concrete, a quasi-brittle material whose failure behavior depends heavily on internal microstructure.
Placement Within Curbach’s Broader Research
Manfred Curbach, born on 28 September 1956 in Dortmund, is a German civil engineer and academic who has led development of textile-reinforced and carbon-reinforced concrete. He holds a professorship at the Technical University of Dresden within the Institute of Concrete Structures, where concrete structures form his primary research focus. His work spans from foundational research through to field-level application.
Among his other research themes are the material behavior of concrete under multi-axial loads and under high loading rates, as well as impact and high-speed dynamics in concrete and concrete structures, where he established an internationally recognized research center. The DEM fracture study connects to his interest in how concrete responds to complex loading conditions.
Related Work on Concrete Behavior
The 2012 fracture study sits alongside other publications by Curbach and collaborators examining concrete under demanding conditions. In 2016, Matthias Quast and Manfred Curbach published “Concrete under biaxial dynamic compressive loading” in Procedia Engineering, and Robert Ritter and Curbach studied the “Shape of Hypersurface of Concrete under Multiaxial Loading” in ACI Materials Journal. Sebastian Wilhelm and Curbach conducted experimental and nonlinear numerical analysis of underwater housings for deep-sea use made of ultra-high performance concrete. Robert Zobel and Curbach performed a numerical study of reinforced and prestressed concrete components under biaxial tensile stresses.
Additional relevant work includes P. Máca, E. Panteki and M. Curbach’s 2016 study on bond stress-slip behavior of concrete and steel under high loading rates, published in the International Journal of Computational Methods and Experimental Measurements.
Publication Context
The 2012 paper is listed among Curbach’s selected publications. A detailed publication list, accessible from the Reinforced Concrete Institute page, was archived on the Wayback Machine on 9 November 2018. Curbach’s broader contributions include leadership of research programs funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and he received the German Future Prize in 2016 together with Chokri Cherif and Peter Offermann.
This explanation is adapted from Wikipedia and is available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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