Fingerprinting of South African ordinary Portland cements, cement blends and mortars for identification purposes — Discrimination with starplots and PCA

This investigation is an attempt to analyse some of the current commercial cements and cement blends in South Africa and mortars produced from them (1:3 mixtures of cementitious material with different sands) for a suite of minor and trace elements that will provide a unique fingerprint of the final product. It was found in both the case of the OPC and the blended cements that a suite of such elements can be successfully employed to uniquely characterise the materials. The contribution of such a fingerprint is that it can provide valuable information in the case of a forensic analysis for discrimination purposes.