Diffusivity of saturated ordinary Portland cement-based materials: A critical review of experimental and analytical modelling approaches

Ravi A. Patel*, Quoc Tri Phung, Suresh C. Seetharam, Janez Perko, Diederik Jacques, Norbert Maes, Geert De Schutter, Guang Ye, Klaas Van Breugel

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

113 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of existing experimental and modelling approaches to determine effective diffusion coefficients of water saturated ordinary Portland cement-based materials. A dataset for diffusivity obtained from different experimental techniques have been presented for cement paste, mortar and concrete. For cement paste at low porosities, diffusivity reported by different authors varies up to a factor of five and electrical resistivity measurements for low capillary porosity are up to one order of magnitude higher compared to other techniques. Experimental data of mortar and concrete reveals predominant influence of increasing tortuosity due to aggregates and limited influence of interface transition zone. Hence, a particular emphasis has been placed on assessing predictability of diffusivity models for cement paste on a larger dataset collected in this paper. It has been observed that all predictive models have similar level of accuracy and fail to predict electrical resistivity data at low capillary porosity as these models are not calibrated using electrical resistivity data.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)52-72
Number of pages21
JournalCement and Concrete Research
Volume90
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2016

Keywords

  • Analytical models
  • B. Microstructure
  • C. Diffusion
  • C. Transport properties
  • D. Cement paste

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