THE PREDICTION OF LONG-TERM CRACK WIDTH IN REINFORCED CONCRETE BEAMS

Creep and shrinkage of concrete will cause time-dependent stresses and strains of concrete and reinforcement both in cracked and un-cracked sections in reinforced concrete beams, which lead to the increase of crack width caused by loads. After a model to calculate the short-term crack width based on bond-slip theory along with the adjustment of parameters by experimental results is established, a novel approach to predict the long-term crack width is put forward and the theoretical formulae are derived, in which the effect of creep and shrinkage of concrete and arrangement of reinforcement is taken into account. Comparison between the theoretical values and experimental data shows that the presented approach holds acceptable precision.