Abstract
The mass concrete structures are generally constructed in an incremental manner by deviding the whole structures by a series of many blocks. The temperature and stress distributions of any specific block are continuously affected by the blocks placed before and after the specific block. For an accurate analysis of mass concrete structures, the sequence of all the blocks must be accordingly considered including the change of material properties with time for those blocks considered. The purpose of this study is to propose a realistic analysis method which can take into account not only the influence of the sequence, time interval and size of concrete block placement on the temperatures and stresses, but also the change of material properties with time. It is seen from this study that the conventional simplified analysis, which neglects material property changes of some blocks with time and does not consider the effect of adjacent blocks in the analysis, may yield large discrepancies in the temperature and stress distributions of mass concrete structures. This study gives a method to choose the minimum number of blocks required to obtain reasonably accurate results in analysis. The study provides a realistic method which can determine the appropriate size and time interval of block placement, and can be efficiently used in the design and construction of mass concrete structures.
