Cracking due to drying shrinkage in an RC wall. Part 1: estimation by bond analysis

Cracks owing to drying shrinkage in reinforced concrete (RC) walls are affected by the reinforcement ratio, the diameter of reinforcing steel, the concrete strength, the shrinkage of concrete, the creep of concrete, the restraint ratio and the length of member. However, because there is no established estimation method that can consider all these parameters, a quantitative crack control of an RC wall is impossible. Accordingly, in this paper, to estimate drying shrinkage cracking behaviour in the walls of RC buildings, an analytical method based on bond analysis was proposed. To verify the validity of the method of analysis of crack width and number of cracks, the uniaxial restrained shrinkage cracking specimen and the small-scale RC wall model were made, and the strains of reinforcing steel and concrete, the crack width and the number of cracks were measured. As a result, generally good agreements were shown between the analytical values and the experimental values.