Basic creep behavior of concretes investigation of the physical mechanisms by using acoustic emission

The Laboratoire Central des Ponts et Chaussées has launched a research project to study the physical mechanisms related to the basic creep of concrete to develop a numerical modeling physically based. In this context, a very important experimental work has been done to investigate, for the same concrete, different aspects of this basic creep behavior.These experimental studies allow proposing an assumption concerning the physical mechanisms at the origin of the basic creep of concrete. This assumption is that the creation of microcracks during creep step (constant load level imposed during the creep test) generates water transfers which induce some additional self-drying shrinkage.