Mohammad Rasoolinejad Wins Outstanding Paper Award

PhD student Mohammad Rasoolinejad received the Outstanding Paper 2019 Award from Materials and Structures. RILEM and the Editors of Materials and Structures have awarded an Outstanding Paper award in recognition of this research. Materials and Structures is the flagship publication of RILEM. Each year, up to nine papers are selected by Materials and Structures board of editors and published as open access papers. These papers, which cover all fields of RILEM activities, exemplify the highest standards in the scientific community.

The paper, titled “Prediction of autogenous shrinkage in concrete from material composition or strength calibrated by a large database, as update to model B4. Mater Struct (2019) 52:33”, concerns large structures and bridges are designed for a lifetime of at least hundred years to satisfy sustainable design and reduce infrastructure costs. Recent failures of concrete structures, such as Koror–Babeldaob bridge in Palau, revealed the importance of accurate creep and shrinkage estimation, especially for the long-term. Bulky structures are particularly susceptible to autogenous shrinkage. The core of bulky structural members such as dams and bridges remains wet for a long period of time and hydration reaction continues to evolve. Recent studies confirm that the hydration reaction continues for decades and even for humidities as low as 0.65 and therefore autogenous shrinkage can cause considerable deformations, especially for low water to cement concretes.  It is generally believed autogenous shrinkage is bounded, but plotting the data points in the logarithmic scale confirms that deformation continues to evolve even after decades. The current study will use the extensive NU database which includes around 400 autogenous shrinkage tests, to find the factors which affect the autogenous shrinkage and to give a predictive model for the design of the concrete structures. The power-law with a power of 0.2 is found to be optimal for times ranging from hours to several decades of years, as the test data give no hint of the upper bound.

Mohammad Rasoolinejad is PhD graduate from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northwestern University. His field of research includes computational solid mechanics, fracture and size effect of quasi-brittle materials, and non-linear and time-dependent behavior of solids especially concrete. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems.

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