A Simplified Mesoscale Approach for the Prediction of Drying Shrinkage of Concrete
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 35, Issue 9
Abstract
The drying shrinkage of concrete is predicted in this study from shrinkage tests conducted on cement paste specimens, combined with mesoscale analysis of mortar and concrete images that were obtained from X-ray micro computed tomography (CT) scanning. A series of shrinkage tests were carried out on cement paste, mortar, and concrete prisms for a period of 6 months to generate input data and validate the model. The effect of aggregate size on drying shrinkage of concrete was also experimentally and numerically investigated. The proposed model uses a quadtree decomposition algorithm to convert digital images of mesostructures into meshes, which are then solved using the scaled boundary finite-element method. In the analysis, mortar was considered as a composite of viscoelastic cement paste and fine aggregates, whereas concrete was considered as a composite of viscoelastic mortar and elastic aggregates. A parametric study was carried out on mesostructures with various aggregate volume ratios to examine the ratio’s influence on shrinkage of concrete and to compare the proposed model with other simplified composite shrinkage models in the literature.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 35 • Issue 9 • September 2023
Copyright
© 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 4, 2022
Accepted: Mar 6, 2023
Published online: Jun 29, 2023
Published in print: Sep 1, 2023
Discussion open until: Nov 29, 2023
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