The Influence of Fly Ash on the Tensile Creep Prediction of High-Strength Concrete at Early Ages

In this study, the tensile creep (TC) of high-strength concrete (HSC) containing 30 wt% fly ash was measured at early ages to investigate the applicability of creep prediction models for concrete containing FA, and to provide ideas to study the prediction model of concrete creep containing other SCMs in the future. The TC values obtained from the experiment were compared with the predicted values of six TC models. Then the accuracy of different models was evaluated by the ratio of predicted values to experimental values. Finally, the applicability of these models to the TC of HSC with fly ash was discussed at an early age. By comparison, it was found that when the loading age was 1d, 2d, and 3d, the ZC model (ZC are the initials for the word “Self-developed” in Chinese), which is a rheology-based model for TC, proposed by Yang.Y et al. agreed with the experimental values. The predicted values of the other five models deviated significantly from the tested ones. When the loading age was 5d and 7d, the calculated results of the ACI 2009R model were more accurate. Compared with the other five models, the time dependency of the paste with fly ash was considered in the ZC model, and parameter q of the ZC model was introduced in order to characterize the influence of fly ash on the paste at early ages. Therefore, this paper demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally that the ZC model can better predict the early-age TC of HSC with fly ash.