Sekandar Zadran

The FE model can realistically replicate the freezing behavior of the investigated cement pastes in terms of generated pore pressure and consequent material deformation. A good agreement is observed between the here-obtained results and those (numerical and experimental) reported in [9]. For cement paste with high porosity and water/cement ratio (PI), the deformation shows contraction followed by expansion.

3.2.2. Geometry and FE Discretization The presented study is carried out based on the experimental work described above to numerically investigate the freeze–thaw behaviour of the specimens under fully and partially saturated conditions. The numerical study is carried out using a 3D coupled hygro-thermo-mechanical model implemented in the in-house FE code MASA [20]. The specimens used in the experimental part of the work have dimensions of 15.0 × 11.0 × 7.0 cm³.