Search arXivSearch

arXiv · 2510.19839

Finite Element and Machine Learning Modeling of Autogenous Self-Healing Concrete

Abstract

A time-dependent modeling framework for autogenous self-healing concrete that couples moisture diffusion with damage evolution was developed. Water transport follows Fick's second law with a damage-dependent diffusivity obtained by power-law interpolation between intact concrete and crack space. Healing reduces damage in proportion to the product of local moisture and a smoothed cement availability field computed via a novel Helmholtz filtering approach that models the spatial extent over which cement clinker can travel and form crystals. Two finite element variants were implemented in FEniCSx: a Crack Diffusion Model (CDM) with standard diffusion and a Crack Membrane Model (CMM) that introduces a novel threshold-based gating mechanism to control cross-crack water transport until a critical moisture threshold is reached. Key control parameters are the initial crack orientation and size, the diffusion coefficients of intact and cracked concrete, the healing rate constant, and the cement availability smoothing parameter. Simulations show that healing time varies non-monotonically with crack orientation, peaking near $45^\circ$ and $135^\circ$ and minimizing near $90^\circ$. The dependence on crack width reverses with material parameters. The CMM reproduces staged moisture penetration with delayed gate activation but lengthens total healing time, whereas the CDM is efficient for parametric sweeps. Machine learning regression models were trained on finite element simulation data to predict healing times $H(σ,γ,β)$ with high accuracy ($R^2 > 0.999$), dramatically reducing computational time. SHAP analysis demonstrated that crack orientation influenced healing time the most, followed by crack width and cement availability smoothing. The modeling framework provides a versatile tool for guiding future laboratory studies and implementations of self-healing concrete.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

William Liu. 2026-03-15. Finite Element and Machine Learning Modeling of Autogenous Self-Healing Concrete. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mtcomm.2025.114451

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Dimension Bridging for 3D RANS with Neural Network Accelerated Gaussian Functional Regression

In many computational science and engineering problems, repeatedly solving fully resolved physics-based models to design for a quantity of interest (QoI) can quickly become intractable, requiring the use of low-fidelity models to predict the same QoI but introduce errors where some features are neglected or are otherwise inaccurately resolved. We use Gaussian Functional Regression (GFR) to learn a correction to a 2D Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) model to predict the aerodynamic coefficients from a 3D RANS model. This model pair has a disparity in the governing physics from the reduced dimensionality, a previously unexplored application for GFR. Empirically, our results show that with a proper choice of low-dimensional (LD) model, the proposed kernel allows for the use of fewer high-dimensional (HD) evaluations to regress a response surface to the same level of accuracy as standard stationary kernels. Moreover, the new kernel provides more informative uncertainty quantification, which we show is advantageous when used to drive an adaptive sampling algorithm. Finally, we propose a novel neural network accelerated kernel, which we show offers predictions in good agreement while speeding up evaluations by millions of times in wall clock measurements, bringing the computational budget within the real-time regime.

cs.CE

SabreAgent: Language Models at Design Time for Lost-Sales Inventory Control

SabreAgent uses a language model at design time to construct two components for lost-sales inventory control: a product-specific seasonal prior and a validation-selected capped base-stock policy family. During operation, statistical forecasting and inventory optimization use these frozen artifacts to determine orders, with zero language-model calls. We evaluate the approach on the $1{,}320$ instances of InventoryBench. Under the benchmark's cost assumptions, the operations-research core draws on a zero-lead-time optimality result and a projected-inventory rule for positive deterministic lead times. The latter computes replenishment shortfalls by propagating inventory using sales along simulated demand paths. The seasonal prior adds forecast variants alongside the original forecaster, and the selected policy family handles stochastic lead times with order destruction. SabreAgent scores $0.6311$, compared with $0.5380$ for the strongest published baseline, and ranks first in all six benchmark cells. Ablations attribute most of the gain to the OR core. In the paired analysis, the seasonal component adds $1.79\%$ across the three real-data cells, and the search component adds $2.3\%$ across the two stochastic-lead-time cells. These results demonstrate how model-generated priors and policy structure can improve an OR controller through design-time use.

cs.CE

Hierarchical Multi-Task Learning with Liquidity-Aware Signals for Stock Forecasting

Stock price forecasting is a long-standing challenge in computational finance, driven by the inherent randomness of markets and complex temporal patterns. While recent deep-learning models have raised forecasting accuracy by jointly modeling inter-stock and temporal price dynamics, they conflate inter-stock relationships with intra-stock temporal dependencies and focus solely on the univariate objective of price movement. To address these limitations, we propose LiMT, a Hierarchical Multi-Task Learning framework that integrates liquidity-aware signals for stock price forecasting. LiMT employs a Market Regime Encoder (MRE) module that first extracts contemporaneous cross-stock dependencies, then models each stock's temporal dynamics, yielding a unified latent state. Building on this latent state, we introduce a Liquidity-Driven Learning (LDL) module, a mixture-of-experts architecture that features cross-task gating mechanisms to jointly predict price movement, volatility, and trading volume. We further design an Adaptive Portfolio Optimization (APO) mechanism that converts multi-task forecasts into executable portfolio weights under transaction-cost and liquidity constraints. Extensive experiments on the CSI300 and CSI500 benchmarks show that LiMT performs best among strong neural and tree-based baselines across the reported metrics. In realistic CSI300 backtests, APO improves annualized return from 3.99% to 10.01% and Sharpe ratio from 1.22 to 1.86 over equal weighting, showing that the multi-task forecasts translate into deployable portfolio gains.

cs.CE