Computational modeling for simulation of post-cooling systems in mass concrete structures

Resumo

Due to the high costs and safety requirements of construction and infrastructure works, thermal cracking
of young concrete has been a concern of the engineering community since the first applications of mass concrete.
The heat generation during hydration and the consequent increase in the temperature of the concrete are very
important, not only because they can generate thermal gradients in space and time, responsible for the appearance
of high initial stresses, but also because deleterious phenomena such as the formation of delayed etringite formation
(DEF) have been shown to be associated with the existence of thermal fields in the early ages of cementitious
material.
In this way, this work will present the numerical implementation for simulating a post-cooling model for mass
concrete structures, on a mesoscopic scale, in which the temperature of the material is reduced during hydration
by the circulation of water in tubes embedded in the forms by a post-cooling system. The implementation was
executed using the finite element method (FEM), in a parallel computing environment, coupled to the TENCIM
software, developed in FORTRAN programming language, developed by PEC / COPPE / UFRJ.