Figure 8

Histograms describing the distribution of damage among nodes in the numerical experiments after six (6) full days of dehydration. The bucket values on the x-axes are damage (see Equation (12) in Supplementary Note 12), which describes the number of broken bonds at a node. For example, 0.0 corresponds to no broken bonds and 0.6 corresponds to \(60\%\) of bonds at a node being broken. The y-axis provides the quantity of nodes which fall into each bucket. Many of the plots have two peaks, the first of which occurs for damage near 0.15 which likely corresponds to crack nucleation and the formation of microfractures; the second peak with damage near 0.5 is primarily from the formation of fracture surfaces, particularly due to debonding between the clay and mortar. From the histograms, it is clear the most sensitive parameters are the shrinkage of both the clay and mortar and the critical stretch of the mortar.