Nuclear cooling tower submitted to shrinkage; behaviour under weight and wind Original Research Article

A numerical formulation to analyse nuclear cooling tower submitted to creep and shrinkage of concrete is presented in this paper. Both humidity effects and non-linear mechanical behaviour of the constitutive materials are taken into account. Moisture migration is described using a single diffusion equation in which the relative humidity is the driving force and delayed strains are obtained in a phenomenological way. To capture the time-dependent behaviour, an extension of a continuum plasticity model which incorporates viscous behaviour, has been developed and its main parameters are obtained from experimental results. The effects produced by internal stresses that result from time-dependent deformations are finally presented for nuclear towel under services loading.