Structures are designed for a specified useful life and verified for planned impacts. The verification concepts usually assume the ideal condition of the building at the time of construction as given for the entire useful life. In fact, the condition of the building materials and therefore the properties of a structure change over time, which can affect reliability, quality and safety.
The aim of the GRK 2075 is the development of models to describe and evaluate changes in the condition and quality of structures in structural engineering.
Funding body:
German Research Foundation (DFG)
The Research Training Group offers an internationally characterized environment in which doctoral and postdoctoral students can grapple with scientifically challenging issues. The individual further education takes place in a study program that offers the possibility to attend conferences and stays abroad and in which internationally recognized scientists are invited to work in the Research Training Group. The training concept includes technical components in the field of experimental building materials science, mathematical-mechanical modeling and structural analysis as well as the acquisition of general qualifications in the field of social skills and scientific work.
Structures are designed for a predetermined service life and verified for planned impacts. The verification concept generally assumes the ideal condition of the building at the time of construction as given for the entire useful life. In fact, the condition of the building materials and thus the properties of the structure change over the course of its useful life, so that its reliability and quality decrease over time and both the structural safety and the usability can be impaired. The process of "changing the state" of building materials and structures can have chemical or physical causes, depending on the type of building material and the impact, and takes place on different spatial and temporal scales.
The goal of the research association is to develop approaches to describe and evaluate changes in the condition and quality of structures in structural engineering under chemical and physical influences. The processes that usually contribute to the change of state are coupled with homogenizing models within the framework of continuum mechanics and the theory of porous media with the aim of numerically investigating the phenomenology of aging and being able to predict it for individual cases. The forecast models should not map the phenomena separately as "island solutions", but should capture the interaction of the processes in order to enable an integral statement about the quality of a building. As a further development of the currently available macroscopic models, the mechanisms on various space and time scales of the material structure are to be investigated, described and experimentally validated. On the basis of the numerical and experimental results, simplifying engineering models up to the application at the structural level are to be developed.
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Manfred Krafczyk
Technische Universität Braunschweig
Institut für rechnergestützte Modellierung im Bauingenieurswesen
Pockelsstraße 3
38106 Braunschweig
Tel.: 0531 391-94500
E-Mail: grk-2075(at)tu-bs.de