LABORATORY TESTS OF COMPRESSIVE CREEP IN CONCRETE SAMPLES: DEVELOPMENT OF SOLUTIONS FOR PROBLEMS OF ACTUATION, MEASUREMENT, DATA ACQUISITION AND LOAD BALANCING
J. R. Di Palma, Paulo Alves Bezerra Morais, Gustavo Coelho, António Bettencourt Ribeiro, Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia · Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (RCAAP Project by FCT) · 2010
This paper reports a study carried out to develop an automatic facility for compressive creep testing of concrete specimens in laboratory.The solutions for actuation, measurement and data acquisition were developed after the identification of the main metrological requirements and operational constraints.The whole transduction chains, from the sensors to the data storage, was be analysed in detail.In addition a software tool was developed as an aid to the delicate process of force application and load balancing.The system has been tested and some results are presented.