Thermomechanical model of hydration swelling in smectitic clays: I two-scale mixture-theory approach (Q4700775)

In the first part, the author presents a two-scale thermomechanical model of an expansive compacted clay composed of adsorbed water and clay platelets, using a mixture approach and the Coleman-Noll method of the exploitation of entropy inequality. In the linear case the author obtains a model similar to those governing thermoelastic consolidation of a non-swelling material, with additional physico-chemical and viscous-type terms accounting for the interaction between adsorbed fluid and clay minerals. The second part is devoted to the extension of the previous model to a three-scale swelling system at micro-, meso- and macrolevels. At the microscale the model has two phases, i.e. disjoint clay minerals and vicinal water. At the mesoscale obtained from microscale homogenizing, the model consists of clay particles obeying the previous two-scale model, and bulk water. The macroscale consists of bulk water homogenized with mesoscale particles. The author also discusses a numerical approximation of the proposed multiscale model by finite elements. Variational formulations and finite element approximations are extended from their classical forms, regarding the thermoelastic consolidation equations, to the present two-scale model. Finally, the author illustrates the proposed approach by numerical simulations of a clay-based barrier for encapsulating a heat-generating container.