A Viscoelastic Model for the Long-Term Deflection of Segmental Prestressed Box Girders

Most of segmental prestressed concrete box girders exhibit excessive multidecade deflections unforeseeable by past and current design codes. To investigate such a behavior, mainly caused by creep and shrinkage phenomena, an effective finite element (FE) formulation is presented in this article. This formulation is developed by invoking the stationarity of an energetic principle for linear viscoelastic problems and relies on the Bazant creep constitutive law. A case study representative of segmental prestressed concrete box girders susceptible to creep is also analyzed in the article, that is, the Colle Isarco viaduct. Its FE model, based on the aforementioned energetic formulation, was succ…

A fractional-order model for aging materials: An application to concrete

Abstract In this paper, the hereditariness of aging materials is modeled within the framework of fractional calculus of variable order. A relevant application is made for the long-term behavior of concrete, for which the creep function is evaluated with the aid of Model B3. The corresponding relaxation function is derived through the Volterra iterated kernels and a comparison with the numerically-obtained relaxation function of Model B3 is also reported. The proposed fractional hereditary aging model (FHAM) for concretes leads to a relaxation function that fully agrees with the well-established Model B3. Furthermore, the FHAM takes full advantage of the formalism of fractional-order calculu…

A numerical integration approach for fractional‐order viscoelastic analysis of hereditary‐aging structures

A Viscoelastic Model for the Long-Term Deflection of Segmental Prestressed Box Girders

Most of segmental prestressed concrete box girders exhibit excessive multidecade deflections unforeseeable by past and current design codes. To investigate such a behavior, mainly caused by creep and shrinkage phenomena, an effective finite element (FE) formulation is presented in this article. This formulation is developed by invoking the stationarity of an energetic principle for linear viscoelastic problems and relies on the Bazant creep constitutive law. A case study representative of segmental prestressed concrete box girders susceptible to creep is also analyzed in the article, that is, the Colle Isarco viaduct. Its FE model, based on the aforementioned energetic formulation, was succ…