Lattice Boltzmann simulations of the permeability and capillary adsorption of cement model microstructures
Laboratory of Construction Materials, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland
Cement and Concrete Research, Volume 42, Issue 12, Pages 1601-1610, 2012
@article{zalzale2012lattice,
title={Lattice Boltzmann simulations of the permeability and capillary adsorption of cement model microstructures},
author={Zalzale, M. and McDonald, PJ},
journal={Cement and Concrete Research},
volume={42},
number={12},
pages={1601–1610},
year={2012},
publisher={Elsevier}
}
The lattice Boltzmann method is used to investigate the permeability of microstructures of cement pastes generated using the numerical models CEMHYD3D (Bentz, 1997) and mIC (Bishnoi and Scrivener, 2009). Results are reported as a function of paste water-to-cement ratio and degree of hydration. The permeability decreases with increasing hydration and decreasing water-to-cement ratio in agreement with experiment. However the permeability is larger than the experimental data recorded using beam bending methods (Vichit-Vadakan and Scherer, 2002). Notwithstanding, the lattice Boltzmann results compare favourably with alternate numerical methods of permeability calculation for cement model microstructures. In addition, we show early results for the liquid/vapour capillary adsorption and desorption isotherms in the same model mIC structures. The broad features of the experimental capillary porosity isotherm are reproduced, although further work is required to adequately parameterise the model.
January 12, 2013 by hgpu