Comparison of various methods applied in porous materials microstructure analysis in regard to hardened cement paste

Dalia Bednarska,Marcin Koniorczyk,R Černý,V Kočí,J Kočí

doi:10.1051/matecconf/201928202043

Dalia Bednarska, Marcin Koniorczyk + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1051/matecconf/201928202043

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Abstract

Porous materials are strongly prevalent among those ones applied in civil engineering. It is crucial to become thoroughly acquainted with material microstructure in order to understand the formation and potential use of investigated substance as well as to develop precise prediction models. The most important parameters describing porous material texture are: specific surface area, shape and volume of pores as well as pore size distribution. There are several methods, which provide such results, however each of them has some limitations. The main purpose of this paper is to compare results obtained by means of various methods commonly applied to microstructure investigation i.e. mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP), low temperature sorption of nitrogen and thermoporometry (TPM) performed with water. The measurements are conducted on gamma aluminum oxide, which is characterized by one dominant pore diameter and hardened cement paste prepared using portland cement (CEM I 42,5R) with water-cement ratio equal to 0.5. The results obtained by the aforementioned methods are described and compared in detail in the report. Each of presented approaches has some drawbacks. Hence, in order to receive consistent description of porous microstructure one has to apply at least two different experimental methods.

Highlights

Porous materials are strongly prevalent among those ones applied in civil engineering
It is crucial to become thoroughly acquainted with material microstructure in order to understand the formation and potential use of investigated substance as well as to develop precise prediction models
The main purpose of this paper is to compare results concerning porosity of hardened cement paste obtained by means of various experimental methods, which are commonly applied to microstructure investigation i.e. mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP), low temperature sorption of nitrogen and thermoporometry (TPM) performed with water as a probe liquid

Summary

Introduction

Porous materials are strongly prevalent among those ones applied in civil engineering. Mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP) as well as low temperature sorption of nitrogen have been the most commonly applied methods so far despite some limitations. MIP is a fast technique, which https://doi.org/10.10 51/matecconf /201928202043 theoretically provides analysis of pores from 3.5 nm to 500 μm [1]. In practice this method is applied in case of macropores [2]. The other standard method applied in pore characterization is the low temperature nitrogen adsorption [4]. In case of the N2 adsorption technique larger mesopores are analysed with low precision due to the fact that such pore diameters correspond to limited range of relative pressures, i.e

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