TY - GEN
T1 - Century-long durability of concrete structures
T2 - Conference on Computational Modelling of Concrete and Concrete Structures, EURO-C 2018
AU - Bažant, Zdeněk P.
AU - Rahimi-Aghdam, Saeed
N1 - Funding Information:
Partial financial supports from the U.S. Department of Transportation, provided through Grant 20778 from the Infrastructure Technology Institute of Northwestern University, and from the NSF under grant CMMI-1129449, are gratefully appreciated.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Computations of long-time hygrothermal effects in concrete structures necessitate a physically based model for autogenous shrinkage and swelling of hardened portland cement paste. The present goal is to propose such a model. As known since 1887, the volume of cement hydration products is slightly smaller than the original volume of cement and water. However, this does not mean that the hydration reaction causes contraction of the cement paste and concrete. According to the authors’ recently proposed paradigm, the opposite is true for porous cement paste as a whole. The growth of C-S-H shells around anhydrous cement grains pushes the neighbors apart and thus causes volume expansion of the porous cement paste as a whole, while the nanoscale volume contraction of hydration products contributes to porosity. The growth of ettringite and portlandite crystals may also cause additional expansion. On the material scale, the expansion always dominates over the contraction, i.e., the hydration per se is, in the bulk, always expansive, while the source of all of the observed shrinkage, whether autogenous or due to external drying, is the compressive elastic or viscoelastic strain in the solid caused by a decrease of chemical potential of pore water, with the corresponding decrease in pore humidity, increase of solid surface tension and, mainly, decrease of disjoining pressure. The low density C-S-H and high density C-S-H are distinguished in the proposed model. The selfdesiccation, shrinkage and swelling can all be predicted from one and the same unified model, as confirmed by comparisons with with the existing experimental evidence. The model is ready for use in finite element programs.
AB - Computations of long-time hygrothermal effects in concrete structures necessitate a physically based model for autogenous shrinkage and swelling of hardened portland cement paste. The present goal is to propose such a model. As known since 1887, the volume of cement hydration products is slightly smaller than the original volume of cement and water. However, this does not mean that the hydration reaction causes contraction of the cement paste and concrete. According to the authors’ recently proposed paradigm, the opposite is true for porous cement paste as a whole. The growth of C-S-H shells around anhydrous cement grains pushes the neighbors apart and thus causes volume expansion of the porous cement paste as a whole, while the nanoscale volume contraction of hydration products contributes to porosity. The growth of ettringite and portlandite crystals may also cause additional expansion. On the material scale, the expansion always dominates over the contraction, i.e., the hydration per se is, in the bulk, always expansive, while the source of all of the observed shrinkage, whether autogenous or due to external drying, is the compressive elastic or viscoelastic strain in the solid caused by a decrease of chemical potential of pore water, with the corresponding decrease in pore humidity, increase of solid surface tension and, mainly, decrease of disjoining pressure. The low density C-S-H and high density C-S-H are distinguished in the proposed model. The selfdesiccation, shrinkage and swelling can all be predicted from one and the same unified model, as confirmed by comparisons with with the existing experimental evidence. The model is ready for use in finite element programs.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85061175602&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85061175602&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1201/9781315182964-2
DO - 10.1201/9781315182964-2
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85061175602
SN - 9781138741171
T3 - Computational Modelling of Concrete Structures - Proceedings of the conference on Computational Modelling of Concrete and Concrete Structures, EURO-C 2018
SP - 15
EP - 24
BT - Computational Modelling of Concrete Structures - Proceedings of the conference on Computational Modelling of Concrete and Concrete Structures, EURO-C 2018
A2 - Pichler, Bernhard
A2 - Rots, Jan G.
A2 - Meschke, Günther
PB - CRC Press/Balkema
Y2 - 26 February 2018 through 1 March 2018
ER -