No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Many concrete structures located in cold climates and in contact with free water are cast with air-entrained concrete. The presence of air pores significantly affects the absorption of water into the concrete, and it may take decades before these are fully saturated. This generally improves the long-term performance of such structures and in particular their frost resistance. To study the long-term moisture conditions in air-entrained concrete, a hygrothermo-mechanical multiphase model is presented, where the rate of filling of air pores with water is described as a separate diffusion process. The driving potential is the concentration of dissolved air, obtained using an averaging procedure with the air pore size distribution as the weighting function. The model is derived using the thermodynamically constrained averaging theory as a starting point. Two examples are presented to demonstrate the capabilities and performance of the proposed model. These show that the model is capable of describing the complete absorption process of water in air-entrained concrete and yields results that comply with laboratory and in situ measurements. Keywords Air-entrained concrete • Multiphase model • Long-term absorption • Diffusion • Pore size distribution The research presented was carried out as a part of Swedish Hydropower Centre-SVC. SVC has been established by the Swedish Energy Agency, Energiforsk and Svenska Kraftnät together with

No abstract

Abstract. Shotcrete (sprayed concrete) is commonly used to support tunnels in good quality hard rock. Including a drainage system often results in end-restrained sections of shotcrete, which have created problems with shrinkage induced cracking. In this paper a multi-physical material model with coupled behaviour between thermal actions, moisture transportation and mechanical strain has been used to model and describe the complex behaviour and effects of shrinkage of such a structure. The model was first calibrated against a free shrinkage test and then used to simulate an experimental setup for testing of end-restrained shrinkage. The first results lead to a need of tuning of the parameters controlling the drying of the shotcrete to accurately describe the experimental results. This tuning could be an indication that the shrinkage behaviour differs between a restrained and an un-restrained sample. However, further research about possible changes in the pore structure as well as more detailed measurements of the early shrinkage behaviour is needed before any such conclusions can be drawn.

No abstract