Nanopore Structure Buildup during Endodontic Cement Hydration Studied by Time-Domain Nuclear Magnetic Resonance of Lower and Higher Mobility 1H

Water as a Probe of the Colloidal Properties of Cement

Cement is produced by mixing mineral phases based on calcium silicates and aluminates with water. The hydration reaction of the mixture leads to a synthetic material with outstanding properties that can be used as a binder for construction applications. Despite the importance of cement in society, for a long time, the chemical reactions involved in its hydration remained poorly understood as a result of the complexity of hydration processes, nanostructure, and transport phenomena. This feature article reviews the recently obtained results using water as a probe to detail the essential features in the setting process. By examining the peculiar physicochemical properties of water, fundamental information on the evolving inorganic colloid matrix can be deduced, ranging from the fractal nanostructure of the inorganic silicate framework to the transport phenomena inside the developing porosity. A similar approach can be transferred to the investigation of a plethora of other complex systems, where water plays the main role in determining the final structural and transport properties (i.e., biomaterials, hydrogels, and colloids).

Stone porosity, wettability changes and other features detected by MRI and NMR relaxometry: a more than 15-year study

Scientists applying magnetic resonance techniques to cultural heritage are now a quite vast and international community, even if these applications are not yet well known outside this community. Not only laboratory experiments but also measurements in the field are now possible, with the use of portable nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) instruments that enable non-invasive and non-destructive studies on items of any size, of high artistic and historical value as well as diagnosis of their conservation state. The situation was completely different in the second half of the 1990s when our group started working on applications of NMR to cultural heritage, by combining the knowledge of NMR for fluids in porous media at the University of Bologna, with the skilfulness of the chemists for cultural heritage of CNR and University of Florence, and Safeguarding Cultural Heritage Department of Aosta. Since then, our interest has been mainly devoted to develop methods to study the structure of pore space and their changes as a result of the decay, as well as to evaluate performance of the protective and conservative treatments of porous materials like stone, ceramic, cements and wood. In this paper, we will review the pathway that led us from the first tentative experiments, in the second half of the 1990s to the current work on these topics.

Nano and sub-nano multiscale porosity formation and other features revealed by 1H NMR relaxometry during cement hydration

Cement hydration occurs when water is added to cement powder, leading to the formation of crystalline products like Portlandite and the quasi-amorphous, poorly crystalline, calcium silicate hydrate (C-S-H) gel. Despite its importance in determining the final properties of the cement, many models exist for the nano and sub-nano level organization of this "liquid stone." (1)H NMR relaxometry in White Portland Cement paste during hydration allowed us to monitor the formation and evolution of the multiscale porosity of the cement, with the formation of structures at nano and sub-nano levels of C-S-H gel (calcium silicate interlayer water, water in small and large gel pores) along with three low-mobility (1)H pools, identified as (1)H nuclei in C-S-H layers, likely belonging to OH groups, with (1)H nuclei in Portlandite, and in crystal water of Ettringite. By assuming these assignments, our data allowed us to compute the distances of pairs of (1)H nuclei in Portlandite and in crystal water ((1.9 ± 0.2) Å and (1.6 ± 0.1) Å, respectively), consistent with the known values of these distances. The picture of the porous structure at nano and sub-nano levels emerging from our results is consistent with the Jennings colloidal model for C-S-H gel. Moreover, the constant values observed during hydration of parameters extracted from our data analysis strongly support that model, being compatible with the picture of C-S-H gel developing in comparable-sized clumps of the same composition, but not easily interpretable by models proposing quasi continuous sheets of C-S-H layers.