Shrinkage Behavior and Prediction Model of Self-Compacting Concrete

Abstract

Shrinkage strain is considered one of the major concerns affecting the dimensional stability of concrete, especially self-compacting concrete (SCC) which comprises different ingredients such as high contents of cementitious material and low coarse aggregate content, compared to conventional concrete. Besides, most available models were designed for conventional concrete, which lack efficiency in predicting shrinkage of SCC. Therefore, this study developed a B4TW-SCC model based on the B4TW-2020 model and B4 model to fit with the NTU-SCC database, which includes 1,316 datasets of SCC shrinkage tests from numerous published research papers for SCC. Furthermore, the shrinkage behavior of SCC was investigated by partially replacing different contents of cement (up to 40% by weight) with fly ash and slag as well as different water to cementitious material (w/cm) ratios in the range 0.36–0.48 for the purpose of evaluation for the modified model. The presence of the mineral admixtures and w/cm ratio had obvious influence on the workability, compressive strength, and shrinkage of SCC. The B4TW-SCC model resulted in the best accuracy compared to other models such as the B4 model, fib 2010 model, ACI 209R-92 model, as well as the prediction models of SCC and the tested shrinkage.