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Elastic and thermodynamic properties of the major clinker phases of Portland cement: Insights from first principles calculations

Abstract

Portland based cement is one of the most popular materials used in the civil and construction applications. Reliable computational methods to provide an insight into the underlying mechanics of the major phases of this material are of great interest for cement design. The present work investigated the performance of density functional theory (DFT) calculations using the PBE-D2 method to predict the mechanical, thermodynamic properties of four major phases namely Alite C3S, Belite C2S, tricalcium aluminate C3A and tetracalcium aluminoferrite C4AF. The calculated elastic properties were in a good agreement with available experimental data. In addition, a deeper insight into the electron density of state, spin-polarization, atomic charge, as well as free energy and entropy properties were also presented. Further development is necessary to improve the established DFT models for predicting the mechanical properties of the ferrite phase of Portland clinker.
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Category

Academic article

Language

English

Author(s)

Affiliation

  • SINTEF Industry / Materials and Nanotechnology
  • Norwegian University of Science and Technology
  • Ton Duc Thang University

Year

2021

Published in

Construction and Building Materials

ISSN

0950-0618

Volume

287

Page(s)

1 - 15

View this publication at Norwegian Research Information Repository