Micro-Scale Creep of Cementitious Materials

Nowadays, micro-scale creep properties are accessible via nanoindentation tests.The paper aims to investigate various analytical expressions used to estimate micro-scale visco-elastic properties of cement paste.Five analytical methods based on various assumptions were tested.The necessity of taking plastic deformations into account was shown.Creep compliance evaluated for a short-term load duration (tens of seconds) was found in the order of usual uniaxial creep tests of cement pastes or concretes that take place on a much longer time scale (tens to hundreds of days).However, the creep response has the same logarithmic nature.Using different evaluation methods exhibited high scatter and direct comparison to uniaxial data does not give a clue how to select the best fitting method.