Abstract
Upon heating, thermal pressurization of the fluid in a porous media may occur according to the poromechanical boundary conditions. This pressure build-up may exceed material strength leading to explosive spalling. Thermal pressurization is a mechanism evoked to explain fire spalling of concrete and is also relevant to applications such as well cement lining in petroleum engineering and nuclear waste disposal structures in which the material is subject to significant temperature changes. The contribution of water in C-S-H gel and interlayer pores to thermal pressurization is yet poorly understood. In this work, we study the evolution of the pressure in C-S-H for different pore sizes (micro-and mesopores) as a function of temperature in undrained and drained conditions using molecular simulations. For the drained case, we consider two different poro-mechanical conditions, the first one at 100% relative humidity (liquid saturated system), and the second one at a constant vapor pressure equal to 0.1 MPa. By analyzing the confining pressure, we show how confinement affects the pressure buildup in the three different poromechanical conditions. We also study water desorption in C-S-H interlayer pores and how confinement affects the liquid-gas water phase transition. We finally compare our model with other available data in the literature. Our collected data shows the importance of nanoscale processes to predict and understand thermal pressurization in cement-based materials.
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We thankfully appreciate the financial support of the French National Research Agency (ANR) via the project THEDESCO (ANR-19-CE22-0004-01).
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Masara, F., Honorio, T., Benboudjema, F. (2023). Is Thermal Pressurization in C-S-H Relevant for Concrete Spalling?. In: Jędrzejewska, A., Kanavaris, F., Azenha, M., Benboudjema, F., Schlicke, D. (eds) International RILEM Conference on Synergising Expertise towards Sustainability and Robustness of Cement-based Materials and Concrete Structures. SynerCrete 2023. RILEM Bookseries, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33211-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33211-1_6
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