Investigations into Volumetric Stability of Aggregates and Shrinkage of Concrete as a Composite

Abstract

The authors aim to quantitatively understand the influence of various aggregate properties on concrete shrinkage behavior based on both experimental and numerical approaches. The multi-scale constitutive model reveals that differences in aggregate Young's modulus cannot be solely responsible for the observed significant difference in corresponding shrinkage behavior of concrete. Hence, shrinkage of the aggregate itself is considered as a possibility and an aggregate shrinkage model that takes into account the surface area and the degree of aggregate saturation is proposed on the basis of earlier experimental results. The proposed model reasonably simulates the greatly varying different shrinkage behavior of concretes with various types of aggregates.