A study of freezing behavior of cementitious materials by poromechanical approach

• Published in: International journal of solids and structures Vol. 48; no. 22; pp. 3267 - 3273
• Main Authors: Zeng, Qiang, Fen-Chong, Teddy, Dangla, Patrick, Li, Kefei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Kidlington Elsevier Ltd 01.11.2011; Elsevier
• Subjects: Air voids; Applied sciences; Buildings. Public works; Cementitious materials; Cements; Civil Engineering; Classical transport; Concretes. Mortars. Grouts; Convective and constrained heat transfer; Engineering Sciences; Exact sciences and technology; Freezing; Fundamental areas of phenomenology (including applications); Heat transfer; Homogenizing; Materials; Mathematical models; Pastes; Phase change; Physics; Poromechanics; Porosity; Statistical physics, thermodynamics, and nonlinear dynamical systems; Strain; Stress relaxation; Transport processes; Cementitious materials; Air voids; Poromechanics; Freezing; Constitutive equation; Phase transformations; Phase change; Porous materials; Homogenization; Frost; Shrinkage; Experimental study; Saturated porous medium; Thermodynamics; Biot theory; Cement paste; Heat mass transfer; Cements; Modelling; Transport processes; Porosity
• ISSN: 0020-7683; 1879-2146
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2011.07.018

The freezing behavior of cementitious materials is investigated in this paper through poromechanical approach after the Biot–Coussy theory. The material is taken as a porous medium saturated with water and subject to freezing. The involved thermodynamic laws are recalled to establish the constitutive equations for the phase change, mass transport and heat transfer processes. As a result, the pore pressure arising from freezing is converted to macroscopic effective stress through homogenization scheme. The established model is applied to predict the macroscopic freezing strain of a saturated cement paste and the theoretical prediction is compared to observed experimental results in ( Powers and Helmuth, 1953). The results show that the poromechanical model can reasonably capture the freezing behaviors from pore pressure accumulation, pore pressure relaxation as well as the thermal shrinkage associated with the freezing process.