ABSTRACT
The combination of drying shrinkage of the new applied repair material and the restraint in the repair system will often lead to cracking. Therefore, the restrained shrinkage in the repaired system becomes a major concern in the repair concrete industry.
In this paper, the effect of drying shrinkage for the new applied repair material was modeled using COMSOL program. The common way to represent shrinkage strain in COMSOL is by heat transfer and moisture diffusion, while the developed model is using the strain module to apply the shrinkage strain on the repaired concrete system. Also, this model uses adaptive refinement techniques as a tester to detect the damaged element which represents the crack. The effect of the relative humidity gradient for the repair material through the depth was considered. The model showed a good agreement with experimental data reported in the literature in prediction the strain at all ages.
