Abstract
Recently, the serviceability and durability of concrete structures under thermal load have received great attention. The thermal stress and clacking behavior of concrete at early ages are one of the important factors that affect such serviceability and durability of concrete structures. Nevertheless, most studies on the behavior of early-age concrete have been confined to the temperature and strain development itself in the laboratory. The desirable efforts to explore the material properties of concrete at early-ages have not been made extensively so far. The purpose of the present study is, therefore, to identify some important material properties that affect the stress behavior of concrete at early-ages. To this end, full-scale concrete base-restrained wall members have been fabricated, and many sensors including thermocouples, strain meters and stress meters were installed inside of the wall members. These sensors were to measure the development of temperatures, strains and stresses at several location in concrete walls during the hardening and curing phase of early-age concrete. By using these measured values of strain and stress, the compliance function at early-age was identified. The basic form of compliance function derived in this study follows the double-power law. However, the results of present study indicate that the values of existing compliance functions are much lower than actual values, especially at very early-ages. It can be seen that the prediction of stresses of early-age concrete based on the proposed compliance function agrees very well with test data. The present study allows more realistic evaluation of varying stresses in early-age concrete under thermal load.
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