Size And High Temperature Effects On The Compressive Strength Of Self Compacting Concretes

Abstract

The compressive strength behavior of concrete is one of the fundamental parameters of structural design as most load-bearing concrete elements, such as beams, columns and slabs. However, it was known that compressive behavior of the concrete elements alter depend on the element size and exposed temperature conditions. When the slenderness (height/diameter) of the concrete elements increased, compressive strength decreased relatively and this behavior known as size effect. In this study, compressive strength variation of the self compacting concrete specimens investigated taking in to account the different slenderness ratio and exposure temperatures. For this purpose, a self compacting mixture was prepared with water to cement ratio of 0.40 and 450 kg/m3 cement dosage. Cylindrical specimens with the diameter of 100 mm and slenderness of 2.0, 1.5, 1.0, and 0.5 were prepared and exposed to the different high temperatures (400, 600 and 800 oC) for an hour. For a control purpose, same size specimens were also tested under the laboratory conditions. The results show that high temperature exposure has severe strength loss effect on the concrete specimens irrespective of the slenderness ratio. Increasing the exposure temperature increased the strength loss of the specimens drastically. Moreover, it was seen that relative strength change (decrease) is evident when specimens' size increased.