A relationship of mesoscopic pore structure and concrete bending strength

Abstract

Pore structure characteristics are important to improve the strength of concrete. Modified Image Photoshop Pro-plus method is proposed in the study to effectively classify the pore structure parameters. To assess bending strength through the mesoscopic pore structure based on the changing water-to-cement ratio, 10 samples with different water-to-cement ratio were obtained by changing water volume or cement content and Modified Image Photoshop Pro-plus was used to extract pore parameters. A better correlation between bending strength and pore parameters, including average pore diameter and spacing factor with different water-to-cement ratio, is obtained. The relationship of total porosity and bending strength can be linearly described as cement content change and water volume keep constant. Changing water-to-cement ratio obviously varies pore structure parameters' value accordingly.