Abstract The aim of this work is to investigate the mechanical performance of hardened cement paste (HCP) under compression at the micrometre length scale. In order to achieve this, both experimental and numerical approaches were applied. In the experimental part, micrometre sized HCP specimens were fabricated and subjected to uniaxial compression by a flat end tip using nanoindenter. During the test, the load-displacement curves can be obtained. In the modelling part, virtual micrometre sized specimens were created from digital material structures obtained by X-ray computed tomography. A computational compression test was then performed on these virtual specimens by a discrete lattice fracture model using the local mechanical properties calibrated in the authors' previous work. A good agreement is found between the experimental and numerical results. The approach proposed in this work forms a general framework for testing and modelling the compression behaviour of cementitious material at the micrometre length scale.

中文翻译：

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硬化水泥浆体微米级单轴压缩破坏的联合试验与数值研究

摘要 这项工作的目的是研究硬化水泥浆体 (HCP) 在微米长度尺度压缩下的机械性能。为了实现这一点，应用了实验和数值方法。在实验部分，制造微米尺寸的 HCP 样品并使用纳米压痕仪通过平端尖端进行单轴压缩。在试验过程中，可以获得载荷-位移曲线。在建模部分，虚拟微米大小的样本是从 X 射线计算机断层扫描获得的数字材料结构中创建的。然后使用作者先前工作中校准的局部机械特性，通过离散晶格断裂模型对这些虚拟试样进行计算压缩测试。在实验和数值结果之间发现了很好的一致性。这项工作中提出的方法形成了一个通用框架，用于在微米长度尺度上测试和模拟胶结材料的压缩行为。