A STUDY OF FREEZING BEHAVIOR OF CEMENTITIOUS MATERIALS BY

POROMECHANICAL APPROACH
A research made by Qiang Zeng, Teddy Fen-Chong, Patrick Dangla and Kefei Li, they
study freezing behavior of cementitious materials by using poromechanical approach. The
material is taken as porous medium saturated with water and subject to freezing. In this research
thermodynamics, mass transfer and heat transfer processes are involved. The pore pressure
arising from freezing is converted to macroscopic effective stress through homogenization
scheme. The established model is applied to predict the macroscopic freezing strain of a
saturated cement paste and the theoretical prediction is compared to observed experimental
results. The results show that the poromechanical model can reasonably capture the freezing
behaviors from pore pressure accumulation, pore pressure relaxation as well as the thermal
shrinkage associated with the freezing process. The researchers concluded that thermoporoelastic
approach is used to define the freezing behavior of porous medium saturated with water and by
the numerical application to cement pastes in freezing, the numerical results reasonably agree
with the freezing strains measured in experiments.