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# Preface to The Mathematics of Concrete"

• Although the concrete is a simple man-made material with initially-controlled composition (for instance, all ingredients are known beforehand, the involved chemical mechanisms are well studied, the mechanical strength of test samples is measured accurately), forecasting its behaviour for large times under variable external (boundary) conditions is not properly understood. The main reason is that the simplicity of the material is only apparent. The combination of the heterogeneity of the material together with the occurrence of a number of multiscale phase transitions either driven by aggressive chemicals (typically ions, like in corrosion situations), or by extreme heating, or by freezing/thawing of the ice lenses within the microstructure, and the inherent non-locality of the mechanical damage leads to mathematically challenging nonlinear coupled systems of partial differential equations (PDEs).

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