Microstructurally-designed cement pastes: A mimic strategy to determine the relationships between microstructure and properties at any hydration degree

This paper proposes a new strategy to study the relationships between cement paste microstructure and its properties. In this perspective, microstructurally-designed cement pastes are produced by replacing a specific part of the actual binder by inert particles of similar fineness. This strategy is referred to as ‘mimic’ in this paper. It is shown that, after complete hydration of the reactive part, the microstructure obtained, in which the inert particles play the role of unhydrated binder particles, exhibits similar properties as a cement paste at a lower hydration degree. The concept is tested and validated on pore profile measured by mercury intrusion porosimetry and compressive strength. The same concept could be applied to other properties. In particular, the obtained materials are fully hydrated, which allows performing time-consuming testing (such as e.g. creep and drying-shrinkage tests) on microstructures equivalent to low degrees of hydration, which would not be possible on the hydrating material counterparts.