Reinforced concrete tank walls and bridge abutments: Early-age behaviour, analytic approaches and numerical models

The article discusses early-age behaviour of reinforced concrete tank walls and bridge abutments. The character of thermal and shrinkage stresses along with typical cracking patterns are presented. Several examples of real structures in which early age cracking was observed are also shown in the article. Finally, available analytic and numerical models to predict thermal-shrinkage stress development and cracking risk in early age concrete in such structures are discussed. An example of numerical analysis is presented to show the advantage of the numerical approach of analysis.