Prediction of fatigue failure in concrete structures remains a major challenge due to progressive material degradation. Reliable prediction, therefore, requires modeling the 3D heterogeneous microstructure of concrete to explain the underlying mechanisms governing fatigue failure. While such mesoscale models can reliably predict the fatigue-induced fracture mechanisms, the identification of the associated material parameters remains a significant challenge due to the high-dimensional parameter space introduced by the model. The key challenge addressed in this study is to capture microcrack initiation and coalescence under fatigue loading, using a model capable of representing fracture process: crack initiation, crack propagation, and final failure. Firstly, concrete domain is discretized into Voronoi cells, enabling explicit representation of aggregates and mortar by randomly assigning cohesive links connecting Voronoi cells as aggregates and mortar. After this, mortar links are modeled as coupled damage–plasticity 3D Timoshenko beam elements with nonlinear kinematic hardening and isotropic softening introduced using embedded discontinuity formulation, enabling fracture Modes I–III, whereas aggregate links are modeled as elastic 3D Timoshenko beam elements. The model efficiency is additionally reinforced by using surrogate model approach, with corresponding material parameter identification carried out by multi-objective Bayesian optimization framework to reproduce experimental results. The performance of the proposed model is illustrated by reproducing experimental results obtained from concrete cube compression test and three-point bending test under low-cycle fatigue loading, where the errors between experimental and numerical results are reduced by 82% (stress) and 88% (energy) for the cube test and by 86% (force) and 93% (energy) for the bending test, relative to the initial dataset error.
Rana et al. (2026) studied this question.