Effect of mixture characteristics on hygro-mechanical properties of wood-aggregate concrete
Abstract
This work aims to study theoretically and experimentally the hygro-mechanical properties of wood-aggregate concrete upon drying. Wood-aggregate concrete is composed of cement paste and wood shavings. The objective is to study the effect of the mixture characteristics on the hygro-mechanical behavior of this concrete. To do so, we measured experimentally the shrinkage strains and the Young's modulus upon drying of mixtures with identical contents of wood but various cement-to-wood mass ratios. To analyze these experimental results, we developed two models: the first is a micromechanical model based on the self-consistent scheme, and it allows linking the Young's modulus of the wood-aggregate concrete to the properties of mixtures (volume fractions and elastic properties of the various phases). The second model couples desorption-induced strains and water transfer to estimate the strains induced by drying shrinkage of concrete samples.