Experimental study on cement paste using the ultrasonic pulse transmission method

Abstract

Cement paste is a hydraulic binding agent made of water and cement. It gives the concrete its solid material matrix when hardened. The hardening of the cement paste relies on the exothermic chemical process referred to as hydration. The progress of the hydration and the associated development of the mechanical material properties depend primarily on the materials' composition and the hydration temperature. These circumstances were taken into account in the design of this experimental study by deliberately varying the water-to-cement mass ratio and the specimen size. A test series on cement paste made of ordinary Portland cement and tap water was conducted using the ultrasonic pulse transmission method with combined compression and shear wave measurement. All measurement data and metadata were finally compiled into datasets in the open-source, binary file format of GNU Octave. These datasets can serve as a database for the development of mechanical models or for feature extraction in the context of machine learning.