Computational Modeling of Drying Shrinkage in Early‐Age Concrete

This contribution is concerned with the computational modeling of durability problems related to drying shrinkage. The associated formulations are conducted by developing a coupled constitutive modeling approach, which is furnished by the robust computational tools within the framework of poroviscoelasticity. In contrast to the existing studies, we employ a physically motivated technique where the pore pressure is obtained as a function of the water content that is determined using sorption‐desorption equations for a given value of the local relative humidity. Therefore, the proposed model accounts for the hygro‐chemo‐mechanical cross coupling effects between the shrinkage‐induced strain development due to the pressure evolution through humidity variations and the stress concentrations in hardening and hardened viscoelastic concrete. The comparison of the numerical examples with experiments demonstrates excellent predictive capacity of the proposed model.