A Surface Humidity Model of Drying Concrete Immediately after Placement

Predicting distribution and variation of humidity inside concrete is essential to improve curing quality of concrete at field. The concrete humidity is predicted by numerical analysis using surface humidity as boundary condition. However, ambient humidity has been used instead of the surface humidity because the surface humidity could not be ccurately measured. Because it is hard to accurately measure the surface humidity, owever, the ambient humidity has been used instead of the surface humidity in the numerical analysis. In this paper, a methodology to accurately measure the surface humidity is suggested, and the ambient humidity and the humidity at the surface and inside the concrete measured by a series of laboratory tests are presented. The cause of low concrete humidity immediately after placement was investigated by a separately performed test. A surface humidity prediction model was developed using the measured humidity, and consequently validated through an additional test.