General Curve Model for Evaluating Mechanical Properties of Concrete at Different Ages

Abstract

During the process of pouring and solidification of concrete, the compressive strength and elastic modulus of concrete exhibit dynamic growth patterns. The mechanical properties of concrete usually remain stable in the later stage (28 days after pouring). Studying appropriate curve models to accurately evaluate the changes in early mechanical properties of concrete has always been an important topic in the field of concrete materials. This work proposes a new dual parameter curve model for accurately evaluating the growth pattern of early compressive strength and elastic modulus of concrete. A comparative study was conducted between the proposed new curve model and existing curve models using 18 sets of experimental data from 10 literature sources. The research results indicate that the fitting average error and standard deviation of this new curve model are significantly smaller than the existing curve models. For some examples, the fitting error and standard deviation of the new model are only about 20%–30% of those of the existing models. The main advantages of this new curve model lie in two aspects. The first advantage is that this new curve model only contains two unknown parameters, so only a small amount of experimental data is required for data fitting and does not require complex mathematical operations. The second advantage is that this new curve model has a wide range of applications, which include compressive strength evaluation and elastic modulus evaluation and can also be extended to the evaluation of the mechanical properties of other materials similar to concrete.