Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) has been widely used in long-span buildings because of its light weight and high transparency. This paper studies the short and long term creep behaviour of ETFE foil. A series of short-term creep and recovery tests were performed, in which the residual strain was observed. A long-term creep test of the ETFE foil was also performed over 110 days. A viscoelastic-plastic model was then established to describe the short-term creep and recovery behaviour. The model contains a traditional multi-Kelvin part and an added steady-flow component to represent the viscoelastic and viscoplastic behaviour, respectively. The model successfully fit the data for three stresses and six temperatures. Additionally, time-temperature equivalency was adopted to predict the long-term creep behaviour of ETFE foil. Horizontal shifting factors were determined from the process of shifting creep-curves at six temperatures. The long-term creep behaviours at three temperatures were predicted. Finally, the long-term creep test showed that the short-term creep test at identical temperatures insufficiently predicted additional creep behaviour, and the long-term test verified the horizontal shifting factors derived from the time-temperature equivalency.

Basic creep in concrete at an early age plays an important role in the mechancal properties of young concrete and many researches on this field have been carried out. According to recent some studies, however, it is the conclusion that for some cases the basic creep measured from the sealed concrete specimen shows inaccurate results. More specifically, for high-strength concrete (HSC), the incorrectness is more apparent due to autogenous shrinkage occurred at an early age. This paper shows the results obtained from experimental study to evaluate the effect of autogenous shrinkage on basic creep. In this study, four different mixture proportions of which primany test variable is water-cement ratio (w/c) were placed and autogenous shrinkage and basic creep tests on the specimen were performed with age and various loading levels. From this research, it was found that the differences between apparent creep and real creep were remarkable in HSC at an early age. Therefore, it is recommended to modify existing basic creep model equation by considering autogenous shrinkage.