Title:
Long-Term Creep Characteristics of Concrete
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Publication:
CIA
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DOI:
Date:
2/13/2011
Abstract:
Concrete creep and shrinkage strains are time-dependent and can build up over time to values which can affect the serviceability of structures such as long span bridges or tall buildings. Ideally creep and shrinkage should be measured after long time periods with these values used when designing structures. However this is impractical as the designer cannot wait for results of long-term testing. Thus there is a strong desire to extrapolate long-term creep characteristics from short-term data. This desire is further exacerbated due to two reasons: firstly there are many sources of short term creep data available in literature as it is easy to evaluate short-term creep characteristics and secondly it is more practical when obtaining design data for the concrete structure to do this in as short a time as possible. It is critical to structure performance that any extrapolations are accurate and it is essential to establish the validity of these extrapolation techniques. This can only be done by comparing the results of the extrapolation techniques used from short-term test results with actual long-term experimentally measured creep data. However long-term creep data is scarce and it is therefore usually difficult to establish the accuracy or validity of these techniques. In this study creep and shrinkage strains were measured after up to 10.9 years of uninterrupted loading. This data was used to assess the validity of various extrapolation techniques for concrete creep.