Combined experimental and numerical study of fracture behaviour of cement paste at the microlevel

Effect of natural carbonation on the pore structure and elastic modulus of the alkali-activated fly ash and slag pastes

“…Regarding blended pastes (S30, S50, S70), their reference spectra for samples at 28,6 180, 393 days have the main band assigned to Si-O stretching vibrations of the SiQ 2 7 tetrahedra located at 960, 953, 947 cm -1 , which shifts to lower wavenumbers with increasing 8 GBFS content, i.e. with increasing Ca/Si ratio, indicating progressive depolymerisation of the 9 silicate chains as reported by Yu et al [56].…”

“…properties of cementitious materials [25][26][27][28][29], and also of AAM [30][31][32][33][34]. For heterogeneous 19 multiphase materials, a statistical indentation method can be used, by analyzing a large 20 number of indents within a representative sample area [35,36].…”

Towards understanding stochastic fracture performance of cement paste at micro length scale based on numerical simulation

“…Based on the same principles, peak-force tapping atomic force microscopy (AFM) can be applied as an alternative tool to quantify the local elastic properties [7]. These techniques provide a meaningful experimental input for analytical and numerical models used to calculate the global micromechanical properties of cement paste [8][9][10][11][12][13] which can be further used as input within a multi-scale framework to simulate the macroscopic mechanical performance of concrete [14][15][16].…”

Micro-cantilever testing of cementitious materials under various loading conditions

“…It is well known that the macroscopic performance of cementitious material mainly depend on the material structure and properties at micro-scale [1]. In the past decades, many studies have been devoted to characterizing the fundamental properties of hardened cement paste [2][3][4]. Among them, nanoindentation has emerged as a powerful tool for this purpose.…”

“…creep) can also been investigated using the nanoindentation technique [6][7][8][9]. However, one major concern of this technique is that the indentation results may be affected by the spatial heterogeneity of the cementitious material [4] as the mechanical properties and geometry of the elastic/plastic zone below the indenter vary with the local material structure. An alternative approach is to create a microscale specimen, for example using focus ion beam milling technique, which has been widely applied to other materials [10][11][12][13][14][15].…”