Thermal analysis and adiabatic calorimetry for early-age concrete members

This paper describes a procedure for thermal analysis on early-age concrete structures with experimentally obtained concrete adiabatic temperature rise and interface conductance between steel formwork and concrete. During hydration, concrete is considered in the analysis as non-homogeneous and the degree of hydration is dependent on both thermal loading and thermal properties development. A thermal convection model was implemented to simulate the external heat loss. Experimentally, two 1.2-m concrete cubes were constructed with embedded temperature sensors. The measured temperature time histories correlate well with the calculated values using a finite element model developed for this study. The modeling method and the experimental procedures developed are able to accurately predict the temperature evolution within an early-age concrete structure.