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Water within pores of cementitious materials plays a crucial role in the damage processes of cement pastes, particularly in the binding material comprising calcium-silicate-hydrates (C-S-H). Here, we employed Grand Canonical Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the properties of water confined at ambient temperature within and between C-S-H nanoparticles or "grains" as a function of the relative humidity (%RH). We address the effect of water on the cohesion of cement pastes by computing fluid internal pressures within and between grains as a function of %RH and intergranular separation distance, from 1 to 10 Å. We found that, within a C-S-H grain and between C-S-H grains, pores are completely filled with water for %RH larger than 20%. While the cohesion of the cement paste is mainly driven by the calcium ions in the C-S-H, water facilitates a disjoining behavior inside a C-S-H grain. Between C-S-H grains, confined water diminishes or enhances the cohesion of the material depending on the intergranular distance. At very low %RH, the loss of water increases the cohesion within a C-S-H grain and reduces the cohesion between C-S-H grains. These findings provide insights into the behavior of C-S-H in dry or high-temperature environments, with a loss of cohesion between C-S-H grains due to the loss of water content. Such quantification provides the necessary baseline to understand cement paste damaging upon extreme thermal, mechanical, and salt-rich environments.

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Very early age (0–20 h) concrete hydration is a complicated chemical reaction. During the very early age period, the concrete condition dramatically changes from liquid state to solid state. This paper presents the authors’ recent research on monitoring very early age concrete hydration characterization by using piezoceramic based smart aggregates. The smart aggregate (SA) transducer is designed as a sandwich structure using two marble blocks and a pre-soldered lead zirconate titanate (PZT) patch. Based on the electromechanical property of piezo materials, the PZT patches function as both actuators and sensors. In addition, the marble blocks provide reliable protection to the fragile PZT patch and develop the SA into a robust embedded actuator or sensor in the structure. The active-sensing approach, which involved a pair of smart aggregates with one as an actuator and the other one as a sensor, was applied in this paper’s experimental investigation of concrete hydration characterization monitoring. In order to completely understand the hydration condition of the inhomogeneous, over-cluttering, high-scattering characteristics of concrete (specifically of very early concrete), a swept sine wave and several constant frequency sine waves were chosen and produced by a function generator to excite the embedded actuating smart aggregate. The PZT vibration induced ultrasonic wave propagated through the concrete and was sent to the other smart aggregate sensor. The electrical signal transferred from the smart aggregate sensor was recorded during the test. As the concrete hydration reaction was occurring, the characteristic of the electrical signal continuously changed. This paper describes the successful investigation of the three states (the fluid state, the transition state, and the hardened state) of very early age concrete hydration based on classification of the received electrical signal. Specifically, the amplitude and frequency response of the electrical signal were of main interest. Both the swept sine wave and the constant frequency sine wave excitation methods presented the same conclusion on the three concrete states during the hydration, which enhances the reliability of the active-sensing approach for very early age concrete hydration monitoring.

Porous silicon has found wide applications in many different fields including catalysis and lithium-ion batteries. Three-dimensional hierarchical macro-/mesoporous silicon is synthesized from zero-dimensional Stöber silica particles through a facile and scalable magnesiothermic reduction process. By systematic structure characterization of the macro-/mesoporous silicon, a self-templating mechanism governing the formation of the porous silicon is proposed. Applications as lithium-ion battery anode and photocatalytic hydrogen evolution catalyst are demonstrated. It is found that the macro-/mesoporous silicon shows significantly improved cyclic and rate performance over the commercial nanosized and micrometer-sized silicon particles. After 300 cycles at 0.2 A g, the reversible specific capacity is still retained as much as 959 mAh g with a high mass loading density of 1.4 mg cm. With the large current density of 2 A g, a reversible capacity of 632 mAh g is exhibited. The coexistence of both macro- and mesoporous structures is responsible for the enhanced performance. The macro-/mesoporous silicon also shows superior catalytic performance for photocatalytic hydrogen evolution compared to the silicon nanoparticles.

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Cement paste has a complex distribution of pores and molecular-scale spaces. This distribution controls the hysteresis of water sorption isotherms and associated bulk dimensional changes (shrinkage). We focus on two locations of evaporable water within the fine structure of pastes, each having unique properties, and we present applied physics models that capture the hysteresis by dividing drying and rewetting into two related regimes based on relative humidity (RH). We show that a continuum model, incorporating a poreblocking mechanism for desorption and equilibrium thermodynamics for adsorption, explains well the sorption hysteresis for a paste that remains above approximately 20% RH. In addition, we show with molecular models and experiments that water in spaces of ≲1 nm width evaporates below approximately 20% RH but reenters throughout the entire RH range. This water is responsible for a drying shrinkage hysteresis similar to that of clays but opposite in direction to typical mesoporous glass. Combining the models of these two regimes allows the entire drying and rewetting hysteresis to be reproduced accurately and provides parameters to predict the corresponding dimensional changes. The resulting model can improve the engineering predictions of long-term drying shrinkage accounting also for the history dependence of strain induced by hysteresis. Alternative strategies for quantitative analyses of the * Corresponding author. hmj@mit.edu PHYSICAL REVIEW APPLIED 3, 064009 (2015) 2331-7019=15=3(6)=064009 (17) 064009-1

The formation of poly(alkylene sebacate-crown ether pseudorotaxane)s by condensation of linear alkylene diols and sebacoyl chloride in the presence of crown ethers in the neat state has been studied. It was found that the average number of crown ether molecules per repeat unit in the polypseudorotaxane was a function of (a) the ring size and (b) the stoichiometric ratio of macrocycle to diol but independent of (i) the equilibration time of the diol and crown ether prior to addition of the diacid chloride, (ii) the length of the diol, and (iii) the temperature of equilibration and polycondensation. All of these observations are consistent with the involvement of hydrogen bonding between the diol and the crown ether as a driving force for threading, except the lack of temperature dependence. Dethreading of the isolated polypseudorotaxanes was shown to be extremely slow. Therefore, it was reasoned that the lack of temperature dependence was due to dethreading during the polymerization, inasmuch as once the ester bond has formed there is no strongly attractive force between the linear and cyclic species and the low molecular weights of the growing oligomeric esters would permit relatively facile dethreading. Based on this idea, a bulky tetraphenylmethane-based bisphenol was employed to make a copolymer (1:4) with 1,10-decanediol; indeed, the purified polyrotaxane contained more than twice as much crown ether as the polypseudorotaxane from the linear diol, confirming that dethreading does occur during the polymerization process. The polyrotaxanes all were capable of extracting metal ions from aqueous solutions. In the cases with high loadings of crown ether two distinct crystalline phases were detected by DSC: one due to the polyester backbone and one due to the crown ether; glass transitions were also observed for the crown ether component of the polyrotaxanes. Polyrotaxanes possess higher intrinsic viscosities than the backbone polymers of the same molecular weight due to increased hydrodynamic volume brought about by the macrocyclic components. However, differential solvation of the backbone and cyclic components of the polyrotaxanes was demonstrated; the intrinsic viscosity of the polyrotaxane decreased in a good solvent for the crown ether. The temperature dependence of the melt viscosity of a polyrotaxane was essentially the same as that of the polyester model backbone, but the absolute melt viscosity was much lower due to reduced chain entanglement.