Evolution of Hydraulic Conductivity of Unsaturated Compacted Na-Bentonite under Confined Condition—Including the Microstructure Effects

Compacted bentonite is envisaged as engineering buffer/backfill material in geological disposal for high-level radioactive waste. In particular, Na-bentonite is characterised by lower hydraulic conductivity and higher swelling competence and cation exchange capacity, compared with other clays. A solid understanding of the hydraulic behaviour of compacted bentonite remains challenging because of the microstructure expansion of the pore system over the confined wetting path. This work proposed a novel theoretical method of pore system evolution of compacted bentonite based on its stacked microstructure, including the dynamic transfer from micro to macro porosity. Furthermore, the Kozeny–Carman equation was revised to evaluate the saturated hydraulic conductivity of compacted bentonite, taking into account microstructure effects on key hydraulic parameters such as porosity, specific surface area and tortuosity. The results show that the prediction of the revised Kozeny–Carman model falls within the acceptable range of experimental saturated hydraulic conductivity. A new constitutive relationship of relative hydraulic conductivity was also developed by considering both the pore network evolution and suction. The proposed constitutive relationship well reveals that unsaturated hydraulic conductivity undergoes a decrease controlled by microstructure evolution before an increase dominated by dropping the gradient of suction during the wetting path, leading to a U-shaped relationship. The predictive outcomes of the new constitutive relationship show an excellent match with laboratory observation of unsaturated hydraulic conductivity for GMZ and MX80 bentonite over the entire wetting path, while the traditional approach overestimates the hydraulic conductivity without consideration of the microstructure effect.

Interplay of Microstructural Parameters On β-Phase Distribution in Al 5xxx Alloys

Al-Mg alloys undergo sensitization when exposed to elevated temperatures, making them susceptible to intergranular corrosion and stress corrosion cracking. Most of the existing research on microstructure effects on sensitization is centered on the effect of intrinsic grain boundary characteristics such as misorientation angle and coincident site lattice (CSL) values. Very few studies have systematically investigated the influence of extrinsic characteristics such as dislocation density. In this paper, the influence of local microstructure characteristics on the sensitization susceptibility of AA5456 was investigated using in situ optical microscopy corrosion experiments and electron back scattering diffraction (EBSD) analysis. The results show a clear trend between the local geometrically necessary dislocation (GND) density and β phase precipitation, with higher GND densities correlating with higher rates sensitized boundaries. This trend held true even for low angle grain boundaries. These results demonstrate the importance of considering factors beyond grain boundary characteristics in determining susceptibility to sensitization.

Tunable Bandgaps in Phononic Crystal Microbeams Based on Microstructure, Piezo and Temperature Effects

A new model of non-classical phononic crystal (PC) microbeam for the elastic wave bandgap generation is provided, incorporating microstructure, piezomagnetism, piezoelectricity and temperature effects. The wave equation of a general magneto–electro–elastic (MEE) phononic crystal microbeam is derived, which recovers piezoelectric- and piezomagnetic-based counterparts as special cases. The piezomagnetic and piezoelectric materials are periodically combined to construct the PC microbeam and corresponding bandgaps are obtained by using the plane wave expansion (PWE) method. The effects of the piezomagnetism, piezoelectricity, microstructure, geometrical parameters and applied multi-fields (e.g., external electric potential, external magnetic potential, temperature change) on the bandgaps are discussed. The numerical results reveal that the bandgap frequency is raised with the presence of piezo and microstructure effects. In addition, the geometry parameters play an important role on the bandgap. Furthermore, large bandgaps can be realized by adjusting the external electric and magnetic potentials at micron scale, and lower bandgap frequency can be realized through the temperature rise at all length scales.