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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 86
PROCEEDINGS OF THE ELEVENTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CIVIL, STRUCTURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING COMPUTING
Edited by: B.H.V. Topping
Paper 4

HYMOSTRUC: An Advanced Program for Prediction of Mechanical Properties and Durability of Civil Engineering Structures

G. Ye, E. Koenders and K. van Breugel

Microlab, Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
G. Ye, E. Koenders, K. van Breugel, "HYMOSTRUC: An Advanced Program for Prediction of Mechanical Properties and Durability of Civil Engineering Structures", in B.H.V. Topping, (Editor), "Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering Computing", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 4, 2007. doi:10.4203/ccp.86.4
Keywords: HYMOSTRUC, cement hydration, modelling, microstructure, concrete, durability.

Summary
In recent years, the performance requirements of concrete structures are continuously challenged. The more and more stringent performance criteria have stimulated fundamental research in concrete technology and structural engineering and have meanwhile brought this on a higher level. It has led to the development of advanced software for the design of concrete structures. Besides this, special software has turned out to be necessary to control the hardening behaviour of concrete, so that a high quality concrete is realized at the "birth" of a structure.

In this contribution the new results will presented generated by the numerical simulation program HYMOSTRUC. The HYMOSTRUC was developed at TU Delft, the Netherlands in the early nineties for simulating the evolution of concrete properties. In the HYMOSTRUC model, the cement hydration is simulated as a function of the particle size distribution and the chemical composition of the cement, of the w/c ratio and of the reaction temperature. The model starts from the cement particles size distribution in a 3D body, the cement particles were considered as individual spheres. Based on an "interaction expansion mechanism", the cement grains gradually grow in outward direction. With progress of the reaction process the growing particles become more and more connected. In this way, a virtual microstructure is formed.

Based on the original principle of the HYMOSTRUC model, the program was extended to predict the heat evolution and shrinkage of concrete at early age, the mechanical properties such as compressive strength and tensile strength of cement paste. Based on a simulated capillary pore network, a permeability modulus has been developed. Up to now, the HYMOSTRUC program has been successfully used on the prediction of fire properties of self-compacting concrete, non-destructivity testing of early age concrete and durability of concrete under different service conditions.

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