Prediction of Heat-Moisture Transportation in Concrete Under Low Temperatures

Frost damage is one of the common degradation processes of construction materials. Moreover, the reliable predictions of internal temperature and humidity distributions consist of the vital parameters to evaluate the degree of frost damage to concrete structures. In view of this need, this paper comprehensively studied the variations of heat and moisture transportation in low temperature concrete. Firstly, it characterized the variations of three pore configurations in concrete as temperature decreasing to quantify two opposing effects, that is, the formation of ice in the pores and the crack propagations caused by excessive ice formation. Then, a multiscale material model was proposed to estimate the effective transport coefficients of heat and moisture in concrete with considering low temperature effect. To predict the internal distributions of heat and moisture in low temperature concrete, the calculated effective coefficients were input in a two-way coupled transport analytical model, whose results were verified by a finite element model.