What is it about?
Portland cement ages upon storage in air, leading to a problem known as clumping. This is due to prehydration, i.e. the interaction of the phases within the Portland cement reacting with moisture in the air. This paper has shown that water condenses in the voids between adjacent cement particles and leads to the formation of hydration products. Formation of ettringite implied that there was transport of sulphate through condensed water films on cement particles.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The study helped us to understand how and why cement ages, and also explain why some chemical admixtures, used widely in modern concrete production, are not effective on aged cements.
Perspectives
This paper came out of a Nanocem-funded collaborative project between the Technical University of Munich, Lund University and the University of Leeds. This was just one of many papers which the student, Elina Dubina, wrote during her PhD.
Leon Black
University of Leeds
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Impact of environmental moisture on C3A polymorphs in the absence and presence of CaSO4· 0·5 H2O, Advances in Cement Research, February 2014, ICE Publishing,
DOI: 10.1680/adcr.12.00062.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
