Flexural Creep Prediction of Polymer Concrete using Recycled-PET Resin

As polymer concrete become more widely used by design engineers, it is important that the viscoelastic mechanical behavior of these materials is properly taken into account. Also, an important consideration in the design of polymer concrete is the behavior of creep according to ages of polymer concrete. In this study, flexural creep test was performed on recycled-PET polymer concrete. An method of accelerating the flexural creep tests, called the two-point method, was developed. The two-point method uses the results of three 24-hours creep tests performed at elevated temperatures to develop a Prony series equation that predicts the long-term creep strains at room temperature. The test results demonstrated that two-point method can predict long-term creep strain with sufficient accuracy. The difference between the predicted creep compliance values from those obtained experimentally was less than 5 percent.