Influence of Supplementary Cementitious Materials on Shrinkage, Creep, and Durability of High-Performance Concrete

Use of high performance concrete (HPC) with locally available supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) has been increasing the world over. The difficulties associated with different indigenous cementitious materials lies in variation in its physical/chemical/mineralogical properties which may greatly influence the time-dependent properties like shrinkage and creep in HPC. A reasonably accurate estimation of actual shrinkage and creep is an important design parameter to ensure that structures built in such concrete perform satisfactorily especially in long-term, and it does not exhibit unduly large deformation or any distress like cracking during its anticipated service life. Further, very old and limited percentage of NU-ITI/RILEM data are for concrete with SCMs, and, hence, all the existing prediction models based on regression analysis of entire/partial data may not ensure satisfactory prediction of shrinkage and creep of modern HPC, in general, and especially for local geographic conditions. Towards this, four different HPC mixes of M50 grade using different SCMs, namely fly ash (FA), silica fume (SF), and ground granulated blast-furnace slag (GGBS) along with ordinary portland cement (OPC) have been prepared to investigate the microstructural and micromechanical concrete properties.