Concrete shrinkage and creep under drying/wetting cycles

Concrete shrinkage and creep under variable hydric conditions are important factors for the safety durability of concrete especially in nuclear reactor or waste storage background. A large (and long – more than 900 days) experimental campaign, conducted on two different concretes, has therefore been designed to study strains non loaded concretes submitted drying liquid water imbibition cycles. For purposes comparison, mass variations during only (50% RH) and/or following cycles drying/rewetting were also recorded. This allowed identification desiccation shrinkage, basic at 10 MPa axial stress. Important results found have shown that final strain not deeply modified by introduction a rewetting phase either material.