LAUSR

Many concrete structures located in cold climates and in contact with free water are cast with air-entrained concrete. The presence of air pores significantly affects the absorption of water into the concrete, and it may take decades before these are fully saturated. This generally improves the long-term performance of such structures and in particular their frost resistance. To study the long-term moisture conditions in air-entrained concrete, a hygro-thermo-mechanical multiphase model is presented, where the rate of filling of air pores with water is described as a separate diffusion process. The driving potential is the concentration of dissolved air, obtained using an averaging procedure with the air pore size distribution as the weighting function. The model is derived using the thermodynamically constrained averaging theory as a starting point. Two examples are presented to demonstrate the capabilities and performance of the proposed model. These show that the model is capable of describing the complete absorption process of water in air-entrained concrete and yields results that comply with laboratory and in situ measurements.