2018 Volume 74 Issue 2 Pages 119-138
It has been generally accepted so far that the initial strain method may be used for crack problems due to chemical reaction induced expansion in concrete because there exists no other reliable method although the initial strain method is not adaptable in some cases. The concept of the work constant theory established by Dr. Tsuji has known to be adaptable for such kinds of problems. However, generalization of his theory has not been yet achieved.
In this paper, unified analytical method is presented in order to treat varieties of chemical expansion in concrete based on the mechanical energy conservation hypothesis, which improves theoretical defects of the work constant theory. Then, some numerical simulations for experimental results such as ASR and expansive concrete are carried out and the proposed method is shown to give more reasonable numerical results than the existing method. Moreover, the proposed method is shown to give admissible numerical results for damage problem containing MgO. Finally, the importance of the accumulation of chemical expansion energy data is stressed for unified treatment in the guidelines to evaluate crack and crack width for such chemical expansion problems.
