Report of RILEM TC 281-CCC: outcomes of a round robin on the resistance to accelerated carbonation of Portland, Portland-fly ash and blast-furnace blended cements.

Unlabelled: Many (inter)national standards exist to evaluate the resistance of mortar and concrete to carbonation. When a carbonation coefficient is used for performance comparison of mixtures or service life prediction, the applied boundary conditions during curing, preconditioning and carbonation play a crucial role, specifically when using latent hydraulic or pozzolanic supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs). An extensive interlaboratory test (ILT) with twenty two participating laboratories was set up in the framework of RILEM TC 281-CCC 'Carbonation of Concrete with SCMs'.

Capillary Imbibition in Cementitious Materials: Effect of Salts and Exposure Condition.

Concrete structures are often exposed to harsh environmental conditions during their service life. Therefore, the investigation of transport properties and deterioration of concrete in different environments is an important topic. This paper reports the influence of salts (NaCl and NaSO) and exposure conditions (ideal laboratory (20 °C, 95% RH), a city and sea environment; including sheltered and exposed conditions) on capillary imbibition in cementitious materials with different water to cement ratios (0.

Deformations in Cement Pastes during Capillary Imbibition and Their Relation to Water and Isopropanol as Imbibing Liquids.

The traditional approach for evaluating capillary imbibition, which describes the phenomena as a linear relationship between mass gain and the square root of time, considers a rigid pore structure. The common deviation from the linearity when using the square-root law (manifested in a downward curvature, i.e.

A matter of size? Material, structural and mechanical strategies for size adaptation in the elytra of Cetoniinae beetles.

Nature's masterfully synthesized biological materials take on greater relevance when viewed through the perspective of evolutionary abundance. The fact that beetles (order Coleoptera) account for a quarter of all extant lifeforms on Earth, makes them prime exponents of evolutionary success. In fact, their forewings are acknowledged as key traits to their radiative-adaptive success, which makes the beetle elytra a model structure for next-generation bioinspired synthetic materials.