Predicting drying shrinkage of steel reinforced concrete columns with enclosed section steels

Owing to the obstruction of section steel on the moisture diffusion in concrete, the existing shrinkage prediction models overestimate the time-dependent deformation of steel reinforced concrete (SRC) columns, particularly for the SRC columns with enclosed section steels. To solve this issue, this study deals with analytical and experimental studies on the drying shrinkage for this type of column. First, an effective method for predicting the drying shrinkage of concrete based on finite element model is introduced and two crucial parameters for simulation of humidity field are determined. Then, the drying shrinkage of SRC columns with enclosed section steels is investigated and two modified parameters, which depend on the ambient relative humidity and the ratio of section steel size to column size, are introduced to the B3 model. Finally, an experiment on the shrinkage deformation of SRC columns with enclosed section steels is conducted. Comparing the predicted results with the experimental ones, it demonstrates that the modified B3 model is quite reasonable.