Development of a coupled finite element model for early age concrete behavior: application to concrete pavements
- Autores: Razmik Martirosyan
- Directores de la Tesis: Albert de la Fuente Antequera (dir. tes.), Sergio H. Pialarissi Cavalaro (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) ( España ) en 2017
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Antonio Aguado de Cea (presid.), Jaume Armengou Orús (secret.), Jaime Carlos Gálvez Ruiz (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería de la Construcción por la Universidad Politécnica de Catalunya
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
Nowadays, concrete pavements are one of the main traditional options of building roads and highways. Moreover, concrete pavements are used for various ground transport infrastructures such as sidewalks, streets and airport. On the other hand, concrete pavements can have indoor applications. These can be warehouses, parking or production areas.
Due to several environmental, technological and economic advantages over flexible pavements along with the increasing investments in infrastructures, there is an increasing trend of construction of concrete pavements over the world. However, despite the current level of the technological development, if not properly designed and constructed, the performance of the concrete pavements may not be satisfying.
Based on the pavement characteristics, performance can be divided into two stages: early age (usually up to 28 days) and service life. Many studies and models are develop to evaluate the service life performance of concrete pavements. In contrast, this is not true for early ages.
In this context, over last 2 decades the interest of the industry about the early age behavior of concrete pavements has increased. At this stages problems may arise related to the thermal, hygral and mechanical behavior of material. Usually, because of the complexity behind these phenomena, these subjects are addressed individually in literature. However, in order to evaluate the behavior of the material as well as the structure at early ages, these factors should be considered together, which is challenging.
The subjects addressed in this doctoral thesis refer to the early age behavior of concrete and the modelling of concrete pavements at this age. The first subject covers the characterization of the thermal, hygral and mechanical properties and behavior of concrete at early ages. Several factors that influence these phenomena are analyzed and summarized separately. The study and the validations show the possibility of the integration of several phenomena affecting the behavior of concrete at early ages and the prediction of the interaction of these phenomena with a single coupled model.
The second subject presents the application of the model to concrete pavements. Based on several factors that were found to have a significant influence on concrete cracking at early ages, a parametric study is conducted. Derivation of optimal values for several physical parameters, such as maximal joint cutting time and optimal joint spacing distance is accomplished. The numerical results show consistency with the literature.
