Semester

Spring

Date of Graduation

2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Type

MS

College

Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering

Committee Chair

Roger Chen

Committee Member

Fei Dai

Committee Member

Terence Musho

Abstract

In this study, the thermal and mechanical properties of two types of concrete were measured. The first type contained ground granulated blast furnace slag, and the second type contained Class F fly ash. The compressive and splitting tensile strength, static elastic modulus, thermal conductivity, adiabatic temperature rise, shrinkage, and compressive creep of the two concretes were measured. Then, the experimental shrinkage and compressive creep results were compared to ACI 209.2R-08 using the material properties of each mix design. Additionally, two semi-adiabatic designs were made and compared with the adiabatic calorimetry measurements. Also, in this study, the thermal conductivity of concrete cylinders embedded with 4% and 8% steel reinforcement was measured. The thermal conductivity of concrete is an essential parameter in predicting the temperature distribution of large structures such as pier stems, and footers. Typically, these structures contain a significant amount of steel reinforcement. Therefore, to accurately predict the temperature gradients, the effect of the steel rebar must be considered. Larger reinforcement ratios were expected to increase the overall heat loss because steel has a higher thermal conductivity than concrete. An overall effective thermal conductivity is proposed to account for the steel reinforcement. The effective thermal conductivity was shown to increase with the reinforcement ratio. Finite-element analysis (FEA) was conducted to model the experimental thermal conductivity tests. Since the production of the experimental specimens is tedious, FEA was used to simulate specimens with different reinforcement ratios. Based on the FEA results, an equation was proposed to estimate the effective thermal conductivity with different reinforcement ratios.

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