Chemo-physical modeling of cement mortar hydration: Role of aggregates

Abstract

After mixing of the cement with water, most of the anhydride products sustain the hydration process and this leads to the hydrate products, e.g. CSH, Ca(OH)2, Afm and Aft. The mentioned hydration process is a highly complex phenomenon involving the chemically based thermo-activation inside the cement mortars during the early age hydration process. The chemo-thermal hydration reactions drasticaly increase at the early age of hydration after the mixing action and then it becomes less important and turns to be nearly asymptotic. The progress of the hydration phenomenon drives the material properties change during the very early age of cement hydration. Regarding the mortar and concrete, such hydration process would not be homogeneous through the cement matrix due to the aggregates presence. These inclusions will affect the temperature distribution as well as degree of hydration. In the current contribution, the chemical and thermal hydration have been firstly investigated by means of SEM observations using replica method and secondly by the 3D-FEM numerical experiments including two different case studies using glass beads as aggregates. The numerical experiments match fairly good the experimental measurements obtained using a pseudo-adiabatic testing setup for the case studies herein. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images observation demonstrates the gap spaces around the glass beads next to the external surfaces. These gaps can be essentially seen for the multi-glass beads case study. The role of the temperature and degree of hydration gradients are clearly obtained using the numerical samples. Some fresh routes and outlooks have been afterwards discussed.