Abstract
The frost damage is mainly caused by freeze of pore water. In a hardened concrete suffering from freeze-thaw action, volume expansion as a result of ice formation and frost shrinkage due to the movement of unfrozen water caused by the ice-lense mechanism are generally observed. Although mechanisms of frost damage have been investigated by many researchers, little discussion has been made on the numerical model to predict freeze-induced strain behavior of concrete. In this paper, a mathematical model was presented to predict behavior based on the thermodynamic theory. Then the theoretical prediction by means of the model was compared with the experimental results and a good agreement was obtained for mortar specimens of different water-cement ratios and sand-cement ratios.
