Abstract
The paper presents the experimental investigations for studying the effect of ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) on the time-dependent deflection of reinforced concrete (RC) beams due to creep and shrinkage. The RC beams were reinforced with 2-10 mm bars at tension side and subjected to constant sustained two-point loading for the period of 150 days. The amount of cement replacement by GGBFS was varied from 0 to 60% with an increment of 20%. The total deflection was measured at different ages of up to 150 days under sustained loads. The experiments revealed that the time-dependent deflection of the reinforced concrete RC beams containing GGBFS was higher than that of plain concrete RC beams. At 150 days, the average creep and shrinkage deflection of RC beams containing 20%, 40% and 60% GGBFS was 1.25, 1.45 and 1.75 times higher than the plain concrete beams. A new model, which is an extension of authors' earlier model, is proposed to incorporate the effect of GGBFS content in predicting the long-term deflection of RC beams. Besides validating the new model with the current data with higher percentage of tension reinforcement, it was also used to predict the authors' earlier data containing lesser percentage of tension reinforcement with reasonable accuracy.