CFD Analysis of Heat and Mass Transfer in the Steam Curing Process of Concrete Blocks

Vivanco E.; Quevedo A.; Nieves A.; Becerra J.; Carrizales J.; Sobrado E. · 2026 10th International Conference on Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, ICMERR 2026 (2026) · DOI: 10.1109/icmerr70056.2026.11643051

Resumen

Steam curing is widely used in the precast concrete industry to accelerate early strength development and reduce formwork turnaround times. However, this process can generate significant t emperature a nd m oisture g radients i nside t he elements, inducing internal stresses and compromising long term durability. To improve steam curing practice, several computational fluid d ynamics b ased m odels h ave b een d eveloped to analyse steam flow patterns, temperature fields and chamber geometries, achieving better control of heating ramps and chamber uniformity. Nevertheless, most of these models treat steam simply as a hot single phase gas and focus mainly on sensible convection, neglecting key phenomena such as evaporation and condensation with latent heat, accelerated hydration kinetics and moisture transport with sorption hysteresis. These simplifications limit their ability to reproduce the coupled hygrothermal behaviour observed experimentally. This study proposes a multiphysics hygrothermal model implemented in ANSYS Fluent that solves the mass, momentum and energy conservation equations for an air steam mixture, including phase change, equivalent age based hydration and a sorption hysteresis formulation for the porous concrete. The model is used to characterise the evolution of temperature and relative humidity fields and to i dentify critical regions with high thermal gradients during the heating stage of an industrial type cycle. The results provide quantitative criteria for selecting safe heating rates and lay the groundwork for integrating hygrothermal simulations into intelligent control strategies for industrial steam curing of precast concrete.

Instituciones: Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas