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A Parallel Reaction-Transport Model Applied to Cement Hydration and Microstructure Development

Published

Author(s)

Jeffrey W. Bullard, Edith Enjolras, William L. George, Steven G. Satterfield, Judith E. Terrill

Abstract

A recently described stochastic reaction-transport model on three-dimensional lattices is parallelized and is used to simulate the time-dependent structural and chemical evolution in multicomponent reactive systems. The model, called HydratiCA, uses probabilistic rules to simulate the kinetics of diffusion, homogeneous reactions, and heterogeneous phenomena such as solid nucleation, growth, and dissolution in complex three-dimensional systems. The algorithms require information only from each lattice site and its immediate neighbors, and this localization enables the parallelized model to exhibit near-linear scaling up to several hundred processors. Although applicable to a wide range of material systems, including sedimentary rock beds, reacting colloids, and biochemical systems, validation is performed here on two minerals that are commonly found in portland cement paste, calcium hydroxide and ettringite, by comparing their simulated dissolution or precipitation rates far from equilibrium to standard rate equations, and also by comparing simulated equilibrium states to thermodynamic calculations, as a function of temperature and pH. Finally, we demonstrate how HydratiCA can be used to investigate microstructure characteristics, such as spatial correlations between different condensed phases, in more complex microstructures.
Citation
Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering
Volume
18

Keywords

building technology, computer simulation, cement hydration, microstructure

Citation

Bullard, J. , Enjolras, E. , George, W. , Satterfield, S. and Terrill, J. (2010), A Parallel Reaction-Transport Model Applied to Cement Hydration and Microstructure Development, Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=902976 (Accessed March 28, 2024)
Created January 18, 2010, Updated June 2, 2021