Project 4

Title:

State of the Art : Improved understanding of pore-water interactions and water transport in cement will bring forward advances in many areas, including the design of tailored materials with SCMs (project 3), degradation and corrosion control (project 7) and materials functionality (project 10). Pore-water interactions are also important to models (project 9). Magnetic resonance relaxation and imaging (NMR and MRI) offers the best means of achieving microscopic information and are already used in the petroleum industry to provide in-situ information on rock-formation pore-size, permeability, oil/water content and oil viscosity down bore holes. The Surrey group has developed a one-sided NMR magnet to profile the water distribution in surface layers of built structures . This method offers improved opportunities for characterising pore-water dynamics and pore-size distributions in cement.
Objectives and innovation : Provision of enabling technology for the MR characterisation of novel cement materials developing out of other projects, e.g. Projects 3, 10 and 7 and to demonstrate the new methods in-situ on built structures. Interaction with other projects (e.g. 3 and 16) is afforded by those researchers visiting Surrey to use equipment. Collaboration with CTG and IETcc will provide the means to gain end-user confidence in the methods since, with these organisations, we will be able to validate on a range of characterised and known structures and corrosion scenarios (project 7) in different climates across Europe.