The creep originates in the calcium silicate hydrates (C-S-H) of hardened Portland cement paste.

It is caused by slips due to bond

ruptures, with bond restorations at adjacent sites. The C-S-H is strongly hydrophilic, and has a colloidal microstructure disordered from
a few nanometers up. The paste has a porosity of about 0.4 to 0.55 and an enormous internal surface area, roughly 500 m 2/cm3. Its
main component is the tri-calcium silicate hydrate gel (3 CaO · 2 SiO 3 · 3 H20, in short C3-S2-H3). The gel forms particles of colloidal
dimensions, weakly bound by van der Waals forces.
The physical mechanism and modeling are still being debated. The constitutive material model in the equations that follow is not the
only one available but has at present the strongest theoretical foundation and fits best the full range of available test data.

At variable mass   of evaporable (i.e., not chemically bound) water per unit volume of concrete, a physically realistic

constitutive relation may be based on the idea of microprestress  , considered to be a dimensionless measure of the stress
peaks at the creep sites in the microstructure. The microprestress is produced as a reaction to chemical volume changes and to
changes in the disjoining pressures acting across the hindered adsorbed water layers in nanopores (which are < 1 nm thick on the
average and at most up to about ten water molecules, or 2.7 nm, in thickness), confined between the C-S-H sheets. The disjoining
pressures develop first due to unequal volume changes of hydration products. Later, they relax due to creep in the C-S-H so as to
maintain thermodynamic equilibrium (i.e., equality of chemical potentials of water) with water vapor in the capillary pores, and build up
due to any changes of temperature or humidity in these pores. The rate of bond breakages may be assumed to be a quadratic function
of the level of microprestress, which requires Eq. (4) to be generalized as

The creep effects are particularly important for prestressed concrete structures (because of their slenderness and high flexibility), and
are paramount in safety analysis of nuclear reactor containments and vessels. At high temperature exposure, as in fire or postulated
nuclear reactor accidents, creep is very large and plays a major role.