Prediction of early compressive strength of mortars at different curing temperature and relative humidity by a modified maturity method

Abstract This paper presents an experimental and modeling study on the influence of curing temperature ( T ) and relative humidity (RH) on the development of early‐age compressive strength of cement mortars. By introducing an RH factor γ RH into the age conversion factor of concrete, a modified maturity function was proposed considering both effects of T and RH on the mechanical properties of mortars. Test results proved that T and RH both had a considerable effect on the compressive strength of mortars, especially at the later stage of curing. The RH factor γ RH increased as curing RH of mortars, and decreased with their curing age when the mortars were under an unsaturated state. The results also show that the factor γ RH could be formulated by a modified hyperbola function. With the proposed RH modified maturity function, the prediction of compressive strength was verified having a high consistency with the experimental results.