The influence of chemical admixtures on the autogenous shrinkage ultra-high performance concrete

Ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) is a material developing remarkable performance with compressive strength of about 200 MPa and flexural strength of approximately 30 MPa on which research is actively conducted today. However, UHPC is also characterized by a mixing composed of a high specific quantity of binder that is a W/B ratio of about 0.2, which requires to examine the effects of the autogenous shrinkage. Accordingly, this study investigates the effects of the use of expansive additive and water reducing agent on the autogenous shrinkage of UHPC at early age. To that goal, autogenous shrinkage test and ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV) monitoring are conducted for a mixing of UHPC using expansive additive and shrinkage reducing agent. The experimental results reveal that the autogenous shrinkage of UHPC reduces by 24% for a mix of UHPC adopting both 7.5% of expansive additive and 1% of shrinkage reducing agent compared to the mix without admixture. Furthermore, this mix is seen to compensate the autogenous shrinkage occurring at early age when UHPC develops its largest stiffness in view of the UPV evolution curve. At that time, the shrinkage stress seems to be extremely softened.