Abstract
Working group 2 of the RILEM TC 238-SCM undertook a comparison of laboratories and techniques for the quantification of the degree of reaction of supplementary cementitious materials in blended cements. A common set of binary pastes of Portland cement with two slags, a calcareous and a siliceous fly ash was tested in seven laboratories. The results obtained by selective dissolution produced were quite scattered and seemed to underestimated the degree of reaction. The analysis of portlandite consumption was found to significantly underestimate the reaction unless additional data from XRD and electron microscopy was gathered to complete the corrections. Despite limited access to electron microscope among the participants and thus only a small data set being collected, this technique appeared as one of the most consistent. XRD-PONKCS gave considerable scatter, due mainly to a lack of a strict protocol and excessive overlap of slag and C–S–H signals. Overall, the study indicated that the precision of determination of the degree of reaction of SCMs in cement pastes is rather low and at best ±5%.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge Bastien Le Gars Santoni and Alexandre Ouzia (EPFL, Switzerland), Xinyuan Ke, Oday H. Hussein (U. Sheffield, UK), Salaheddine Alahrache (Empa, Switzerland), Sandra De Buck and Tom Planckaert (UGent, Belgium), Ricardo García-Roves (IETcc-CSIC) for their participation in the experiments.
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The participation of members of U. Sheffield (UK) was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement #335928 (GeopolyConc).
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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Appendix: Experimental setups
Appendix: Experimental setups
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Durdziński, P.T., Ben Haha, M., Bernal, S.A. et al. Outcomes of the RILEM round robin on degree of reaction of slag and fly ash in blended cements. Mater Struct 50, 135 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1617/s11527-017-1002-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1617/s11527-017-1002-1