Renan's PhD

The viscoelastic properties of cement-based materials are crucial for various applications, such as deformation serviceability assessment, crack width prediction, and stress state evaluation during service. However, characterizing these properties is challenging and expensive since it requires determining their time-dependent behavior from early to old ages (ranging from a few hours to several months) and over short to long timescales (ranging from seconds to decades). Furthermore, these materials undergo a solidification process, transitioning from a viscoelastic fluid to a viscoelastic aging solid, making the test setups difficult to implement and the tests duration long. Few experimental studies have been conducted to expedite these tests, and their findings are yet inconclusive. Renan’s PhD research aims to develop a new experimental technique based on dynamic methods to investigate the viscoelastic behavior of cementitious materials, with a focus on short-term viscoelastic response. This approach has the potential to provide new insights into the material behavior and facilitate the experimental characterization of viscoelastic properties of cement-based materials.

The work is being conducted through a collaborative effort between the University of Minho in Portugal and the University of Brasília in Brazil.