Study on the Permeability Characteristics of Foamed Concrete Using a Pore-Scale Model from X-Ray Microcomputed Tomography Image Reconstruction and Numerical Simulation
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 33, Issue 6
Abstract
Foamed concrete has attracted increasing attention in civil engineering due to its unique properties. Permeability is one of the significant material properties that governs its long-term durability. This work presents a method to explore the permeability characteristics of foamed concrete based on X-ray microcomputed tomography (micro-CT) image reconstruction technique and Simpleware version M-2017.06 software. The pressure and water flow distributions in foamed concrete were obtained, and the permeability of the foamed concrete with different densities was calculated. The numerical simulation results showed that the proposed method can be used to predict the permeability of foamed concrete. The main factors that affect the permeability of foamed concrete are discussed. A power law model is established to reveal the relationship between the porosity and permeability of the foamed concrete, and the connectivity of pores was labeled to explain why the permeability of three different location calculation models are not the same under the same density conditions. Furthermore, the influence of boundary conditions on the calculation results of the permeability was analyzed, and a comparison of the 2D and 3D results were carried out to determine whether it is necessary to reconstruct the 2D CT images into 3D pore-scale physical models.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published article.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51922104 and 51991392), Science and Technology Research and Development Program of China State Railway Group Co., Ltd. (Grant No. P2018G045), Hubei Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 2018CFA012), Key Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. KFZD-SW-423), the Second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research Program (STEP) (No. 2019QZKK0904), the support of Qingdao Geo-Engineering Exploration Institute and Key laboratory of Urban Geology and Underground Space Resources, Shandong Provincial Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources (No. 2019-QDDZYKF05) and Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS. Furthermore, the authors would like to appreciate Professor Houzhen Wei and Dr. Yan Wang for their help in the experiments.
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 33 • Issue 6 • June 2021
Copyright
© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jan 2, 2020
Accepted: Oct 30, 2020
Published online: Mar 27, 2021
Published in print: Jun 1, 2021
Discussion open until: Aug 27, 2021
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