Basic creep of concrete under compression, tension and bending

Investigations on concrete creep are often limited to the compression behavior due to the difficulty of performing tensile tests on cement-based materials. This paper describes the experimental setup developed to achieve direct tensile and bending concrete creep. The precautions taken to obtain relevant data are described. For comparison, tensile, flexural and compressive basic creep test were conducted in parallel. Although the approach is still controversial, the basic creep strain was determined by subtracting the shrinkage strain and instantaneous strain from the total strain. Results available for specimens subjected to 50% of the strength in tension or in compression are presented. The final discussion compares the basic creep under the different types of loading.