To study the sulfate resistance of ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) in saline soil area of western China, four kinds of sulfate solution concentrations (0 %, 5 %, 10 %, 15 %) and 18 drywet cycle tests for 540 days were carried out on UHPC specimens. The effects of sulfate dry-wet cycles on the evolution of UHPC strength and energy were studied, the characteristic stress points during uniaxial compression of UHPC under sulfate dry-wet cycle were determined, based on the evolution law of each energy (total energy U , dissipated energy U d , elastic stress U e ) at the characteristic stress points, the energy storage index was established to measure the damage degree of UHPC. The results show that the energy evolution process and damage mechanism of UHPC samples under sulfate-wet and dry cycle erosion are closely related to macro and micro changes. With the development of sulfate dry-wet cycle, the dissipative energy U d and elastic strain energy U e of UHPC at the characteristic stress points increased first and then decreased. The development trend of elastic strain energy U e and dissipative energy U d is more severe with the increase of sulfate solution concentration. The ratio of elastic strain energy at damage stress to elastic strain energy at peak stress ( U e ib /U i e ) is taken as the energy storage index K ib to measure the damage degree of UHPC, under 10%Na 2 SO 4 erosion, K ib can be increased by 21.41 % at the highest and decreased by 29.67 % at the lowest compared with the initial value. It shows that the damage process of UHPC is difficult and then easy, and this index can accurately reflect the external force required for the damage of UHPC under sulfate dry-wet cyclic erosion, and provide a reference for the safe and stable operation of UHPC in saline soil area.

The strength and dilatancy of sand are mainly influenced by the void ratio, confining pressure and stress path. In engineering, the stress-strain relationship of sand in three-dimensional stress state is complicated, where the state-dependent properties of sand are difficult to be described by traditional constitutive models. Thus, fractional plastic models based on different fractional derivatives were developed to capture such state-dependent behavior of sand. This paper attempts to make a comparative study of the fractional models based on two typical fractional derivatives, i.e., the R-L derivative and Caputo derivative. The results show that the different types of fractional derivatives are mainly reflected in the different order of differentiation and integration, which will have a significant impact on the calculation of plastic flow direction, stress-dilatancy ratio and fractional order parameter beta in the constitutive model. By determining the constitutive parameters of the two models, the constitutive behaviors predicted by different models were compared with the corresponding test results of saturated sands under different initial mean pressures and different stress paths. The models can reasonably simulate the test results of saturated sands, where the dilatancy characteristic can be captured. Compared with RL model, Caputo model can predict more volumetric strain in the dilatancy process, and has better prediction effect. Overall, the predicted effects of the two models are close, with a maximum difference of about 7 %.

The size of mineral grain has a significant impact on the initiation and propagation of microcracks within rocks. In this study, fine-, medium-, and coarse-grained granites were used to investigate microcrack evolution and characteristic stress under uniaxial compression using the acoustic emission (AE), digital image correlation (DIC), and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements. The experimental results show that the characteristic stress of each granite decreased considerably with increasing grain sizes. The inflection points of the b-value occurred earlier with an increase in grain sizes, indicating that the larger grains promote the generation and propagation of microcracks. The distribution characteristics of the average frequency (AF) and the ratio of rise time to amplitude (RA) indicate that the proportion of shear microcracks increases with increasing grain size. The NMR results indicate that the porosity and the proportion of large pores increased with increasing grain size, which may intensify the microcrack evolution. Moreover, analysis of the DIC and AE event rates suggests that the high-displacement regions could serve as a criterion for the degree of microcrack propagation. The study found that granites with larger grains had a higher proportion of high-displacement regions, which can lead to larger-scale cracking or even spalling. These findings are not only beneficial to understand the pattern of micro- crack evolution with different grain sizes, but also provide guidance for rock monitoring and instability assessment. (c) 2024 Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license.