Abstract
Accelerated curing regimes are widely used to produce prefabricated concrete elements to improve construction quality and reduce time costs. A new accelerated curing regime, direct electric curing (EC), is proposed, and its effect on the performance of cement paste and energy consumption is discussed and compared with the common accelerated curing regime (steam curing). The results show that EC can significantly accelerate the early-ages hydration process of cement paste and increase its 1-d content of hydration products. The compressive strength (1–28 d) of the electro-cured specimen is higher than of the standard-cured sample, but its sorptivity coefficient and drying shrinkage value increases slightly due to the coarsening of the pore structure. EC can greatly improve the energy utilization efficiency in the process of curing cement sample, and its 1-d energy consumption per cubic meter of sample per MPa is only 3.65% of that in steam curing. In order to further improve the energy efficiency of EC, sodium sulphate (SS) is incorporated to the cement paste as a hardening accelerator. Incorporation of SS can further improve the early-ages strength of cement sample, making its 8-h compressive strength (1.5–2% SS) surpass the 1-d strength of steam-cured and electric-cured plain pastes. This means that the combined application of EDS and SS can not only shorten the demoulding time (saving time cost), but also further improve the energy utilization efficiency. The 8-h energy consumption (kWh/m3⸳MPa) of electro-cured cement sample after incorporating 1% SS is only 1.18% of that of steam curing and 35.8% of that of single EC. Under the synergistic acceleration of SS and EC, the energy consumed by curing prefabricated components is significantly reduced, which could lead to an energy revolution and promote sustainable development in building engineering.
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