A recent survey has showed the prediction of the long-term deflection of existing concrete bridges after several decades is a great challange in civil engineering. The crux is to predict the creep deflection of a concrete structure after several decades from laboratory tests carried out over few months. This work aims at combining microindentation tests and as short as possible Uniaxial Compression Creep Test (UCCT) to characterize the modulus C and the characteristic time τch of the compliance function of basic creep used in modern design codes.First, concrete samples made of cement paste, mortar and concrete with a water-to-cement ratio of 0.6 were cured and loaded in sealed condition at a age of 90 days under UCCT for a duration of 1 year. A convergence study showed that the duration of UCCT which is needed to accurately estimate the characteristic time τch and creep modulus C is about 30 days and 300 days, respectively. Then, the creep modulus C was measured by microindentation tests on the cement paste and homogenized at the scale of mortar and concrete by micromechanics. Finally, the compliance creep function obtained by the proposed two-scale method was compared to experimental results which are available in open literature and other ones of existing design models, such as the model code 2010 and the well-established B4 model. As main result, the proposed simplified method which combines short (2-month) UCCT and rapid microindentation tests showed to be practical and accurate to characterize the basic creep compliance function of concrete.
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