Investigating permeability and carbonation behavior of sustainable cements

Abstract:

The durability of new sustainable cementitious materials is intimately linked with the ability for these materials to prevent the ingress of aggressive ions through their percolated pore networks. However, it is also important to be able to control and limit the detrimental chemical degradation mechanisms that occur to the cement binder once the ions have diffused through the pore network. Here, alkali-activated materials will be discussed, and recent research on measuring the permeability of this class of cements using the beam-bending method will be presented. It will be shown that the permeability can be controlled by tailoring the activator chemistry, and that the addition of free silica in the activator has a strong (favorable) influence on the resulting percolated pore network.

Carbonation is one type of chemical degradation process that is known to severely shorten the service life of concrete, especially in environments containing elevated CO­₂ levels. However, the exact atomic structural changes that occur to the main binder phase (calcium-silicate-hydrate gel) during carbonation remain largely unknown. Here, X-ray pair distribution function analysis is used to elucidate the local atomic structural changes that occur during carbonation of calcium-silicate-hydrate gel and calcium-aluminosilicate-hydrate gel (alkali-activated slag binder), where distinct differences in the extent of gel decalcification are measured according to the chemistry of the starting precursor material. The results will be discussed in the context of limiting the extent of carbonation in cementitious materials, with potential applications of alkali-activated materials in geological storage of CO₂ due to their increased resistance to carbonation.