Indirect assessment of hydraulic diffusivity and permeability for unsaturated cement-based material from sorptivity

The hydraulic diffusivity, water permeability and relative gas permeability for cement-based materials are indirectly evaluated from measured sorptivity and water vapor sorption isotherms (WVSIs). The dependence of sorptivity on initial saturation degree is first established to help calculate hydraulic diffusivity and other transport properties. An experimental program with a self-scaled preconditioning strategy is also carefully designed and conducted on three concretes to measure their sorptivity, WVSIs as well as permeability to various fluids. It's found that hydraulic diffusivity of ambiguous physical significance may be not a good durability indicator. The predicted water permeability is larger than measured value but at the same order of magnitude. This overestimation is attributed to the required drying preconditioning. The predicted relative water permeability agrees well with reported data. However, the predicted relative gas permeability agrees with the measured data from classical CEMBUREAU method better than that from tri-axial permeameter with higher inlet gas pressure.