Early age stress-crack opening relationships for high performance concrete

Stress–crack opening relationships for concrete in early age have been determined for two high performance concrete mixes with water to cementitious materials ratios of 0.307 and 0.48. The wedge splitting test setup was used experimentally and the cracked nonlinear hinge model based on the fictitious crack model was applied for the interpretation of the results. A newly developed inverse analysis algorithm was utilized for the extraction of the stress–crack opening relationships. Experiments were conducted at 8, 10, 13, 17, 22, 28, 48, 168 h (7 days) and 672 h (28 days). At the same ages, split tests were carried out. Fracture energy, Gf , was found to increase with age, while the characteristic length, lch, was found to decrease.