Numerical modeling of water and chloride ingress in unsaturated concrete

Please check whether enrolling in this project is possible by directly contacting the responsible supervisor(s) indicated below as soon as possible. Note that although we announce many topics, we won't be able to offer all of them simultaneously due to limited lab capacity.

simulation results — Simulations of water ingress through concrete microstructure.

Ingress of water and aggressive species, such as chloride, is common cause of deterioration of reinforced concrete structures. Therefore, appropriate transport models are essential for accurate predication of structures durability.

Traditional models use macroscale approach where all properties, such as porosity, permeability or diffusivity are averaged over some representative volume. However, actual relevant processes are happening at the microscale (pore-scale) level and are still not well understood.

The aim of this project is to use high-fidelity numerical modeling to study flow and transport processes directly at the pore level using real concrete microstructure. The student will use state-of-the-art computational approach based on open-source software and will be able to choose between different topics, such as:

Modeling of water ingress in concrete
Modeling of chloride ingress in concrete.
Modeling of coupled water and chloride ingress.
Modeling of moisture distribution at the steel - concrete interface.
Upscaling of transport properties (from pore-scale to macro-scale).

Basic programing knowledge and willingness to learn using Linux computers (such as ETH computer cluster) is required. Previous experience with modeling is beneficial but not mandatory to carry out this project.