EXPERIMENTAL AND THEORETICAL RESEARCH ON TENSILE CREEP OF EARLY-AGE CONCRETE

This paper investigates the tensile creep of early-age concrete subjected to intrinsic hydration temperature rise and autogenous shrinkage. Through a temperature stress test machine (TSTM), the tensile creep of early-age concrete is studied experimentally. Then, a double power law is attributed to the tensile creep with the model parameters identified from the test results. The calibrated tensile creep model is used to calculate the internal stress of a concrete structure at early-age. Both experimental data and numerical results show that the tensile creep is very different from compressive creep and the direct use of compressive creep in early-age stress evaluation of concrete stress would give unsafe results.