Concrete composite acts like a spring!

A novel cementitious composite integrating 3D printed hyperelastic frame is developed. In contrast to conventional concrete, the novel composite shows strain-hardening behavior under uniaxial compression: the stress continuously increases with strain up to approximately 40 % strain. More importantly, the ACC exhibit highly recoverable deformability of 10 % strain under cyclic loading (20 times higher than the constituent cementitious material). These traits allow the composite to exhibit significantly improved energy dissipation capacity compared to conventional concrete, which gives the composite great potential to be applied in engineering practice where high compressive deformability is required, for instance yielding elements for squeezing tunnel lining.Read here for more details.