Data supporting the PhD thesis: Experimental and Numerical Study of Reactions and Microstructural Development in Lime-cement Binders

This collection of files contains experimental and numerical simulation results to support the PhD thesis entitled 'Experimental and Numerical Study of Reactions and Microstructural Development in Lime-cement Binders'. This research aims to understand the hardening mechanisms under different conditions and to develop numerical models to simulate phase assemblage evolution and microstructural development. Towards this goal, the effects of lime content, relative humidity, and CO2 concentration were experimentally investigated in Chapter 3. Two dominant reaction mechanisms, hydration and carbonation were then investigated in Chapter 4 and 5, respectively. Numerical models were subsequently developed to simulate both hydration and carbonation reactions and their associated microstructural evolution. Three-dimensional particles were first generated from microscopy images of raw materials, and then randomly placed to generate the initial packing structure (Chapter 6). In Chapter 7, hydration reactions were simulated with an empirical model and a reactive transport model, and the effectiveness of bothtypes of models was validated by experimental results obtained in Part II. Microstructures generated by the reactive transport model were then used to simulatecarbonation reactions at the micro scale, and then integrated into a pore-scale framework to simulate carbonation behaviour of lime-cement binders (Chapter 8). More details about the experimental methods and modelling strategy can be found in the thesis manuscript.