Unsteady model of the hydration process of a reinforced concrete product at software-controlled heating

Abstract

The development of mathematical models for design of the thermal technology equipment intended for accelerated hydration of concrete products is an urgent task of industrial heat power engineering. The introduction of mathematical modeling methods can reduce the time and the resources spent for the development of technological regimes that reduce energy consumption in the production of building structures and, ultimately, in the construction of buildings and structures for various purposes. There is not yet a generally accepted mathematical model of thermal processes occurring in thermal technological installations in the case of accelerated hardening of a three-dimensional concrete object. The purpose of this work is to develop an unsteady model of the concrete hydration process applied to a symmetrical three-dimensional reinforced concrete product at software-controlled heating. By using the numerical finite-volume method in the case of a 0.3 × 0.3 ×0.3 mcube, a three-dimensional feld of hydration in a concrete object at a given operation mode of a heater is calculated. The following heating mode was used: “heating–maintaining at a constant temperature–cooling”. The dependences of a temperature difference between reinforced and non-reinforced cubic products on the hardening time at the corresponding space points in the direction from the surface to the center of the product have been obtained. By the example of the numerical simulation results, it is shown that the evolution of the hydration degree at these points during the hardening of non-reinforced concrete differs from the hardening of reinforced concrete. The time dependences of heat treatment of a rate of temperature change and the hydration coefficient at the selected points of a product are presented. The obtained results are analyzed.