Steady state flow of cement suspensions: A micromechanical state of the art

Fresh cementitious pastes can be viewed as suspensions of particles of many different sizes (from several tens of nm to 100 μm) in a continuous fluid phase. This broad poly-dispersity implies that various interactions such as surface forces (or colloidal interactions), Brownian forces, hydrodynamic forces or various contact forces between particles interplay. Depending on the volume fraction of the particles in the mixture, the use of admixtures or the magnitude of either the applied stress or strain rate, one or several of these interactions dominate. Our objective here is not to quantitatively predict rheology of cement pastes but rather to understand and classify the situations where, depending on composition and processing, one or other of the physical phenomena will control the macroscopic behavior. The result of this analysis is a conceptual diagram of predominant interactions in flowing cementitious suspensions under simple shear, as a function of shear rate and solid fraction.