Modelling creep of high strength concrete

Recent developments in concrete mixing made possible the production of concretes with high compressive strength showing, simultaneously, high workability These concretes also present high strengths at young ages, allowing the application of loads sooner It is of fundamental importance to verify if creep models developed for current concrete still apply to these new concretes First, a FEM-based software was adopted to test available creep models, most used for normal strength concrete, considering examples with known analytical results Several limitations were registered, resulting in an incorrect simulation of three-dimensional creep Afterwards, it was implemented a Kelvin-chain algorithm allowing the use of a chosen number of elements, which adequately simulated the adopted examples From the comparison between numerical and experimental results, it was concluded that the adopted algorithm can be used to model creep of high strength concrete, if the material properties are previously experimentally assessed