Consideration of soil temperature in the modelling of early-age mass concrete slab

Abstract

Modeling the structural behavior of concrete at early ages is one of the most challenging, yet fundamental, tasks for civil engineers working on mass concrete. To obtain a reasonably accurate model, a number of factors should be taken into account. Considerations should include both external influences as well as the changes occurring in the complex structure itself. The modeling of an early-age concrete massive slab requires the proper assignment of initial conditions, including the initial temperature of the analyzed element and the adjacent structures. The temperature distribution in the subsoil is the factor analyzed in this paper. The aim of the study is the determination of the temperature distribution in the ground, which is useful in the process related to the acquisition of the most accurate model of the analyzed structure and reflects the actual conditions in the numerical model. For this purpose, the analytical method described in the literature was applied and subsequently evaluated on the basis of the numerical calculation. The performed calculations allow the estimation of the depth representing the range of the influence of the temperature in the ground and the values of the temperatures corresponding to the successive layers of the subsoil. Moreover, aiming the optimization of the numerical analysis of the massive foundation slab, the legitimacy of such detailed consideration of the temperature development in the underlying subsoil was evaluated by the comparison with the temperature distribution in the slab obtained with simplified consideration of the constant soil temperature.