Effects of mineral admixtures on shear thickening of cement paste

•Influence of FA, LP and SL on shear thickening of cement paste are investigated.•γcrit, τcrit, ηmin and rheological index (n) are put forward to describe and compare shear thickening.•The addition of FA, LP and SL into cement paste make paste take on shear thickening easily.•Intensity sequence of shear thickening of mineral admixture to cement paste are SL, FA and LP.

Rheological behaviors are the essential workability characteristics of fresh concrete. Generally speaking, paste volume in self-compacting concrete (SCC) are no less than 340 L/m3. Therefore, rheology of paste could be mainly responsible for rheology of SCC. Mineral admixtures are important for modern concrete, taking great influence on concrete rheology. In this paper, an experiment was designed to investigate the shear thickening behaviors of cement paste replaced by fly ash (FA), slag (SL) and limestone powder (LP), respectively.Results show that plastic viscosity of paste discussed in this paper prominently decrease first and then increase with the shear rate increasing. Therefore, there exist critical shear rate (γcrit), critical shear stress (τcrit) and minimum plastic viscosity (ηmin) in rheological curves at the beginning of shear thickening taking place. The addition of FA, SL and LP into cement paste not only decrease the γcrit, τcrit and ηmin, resulting in cement paste easy to exhibit shear thickening, but also increase the rheological index (n), leading to shear thickening intensity augmenting. γcrit of cement paste with addition 30% SL drops to10 s−1, displaying shear thickening response taking place easily compared to cement paste with the same FA and LP contents. Rheological index (n) of cement paste with SL is also larger than cement paste with FA and LP at the same mineral admixtures contents. The shear thickening intensity sequence of cement paste under the effects of mineral admixtures are SL, FA and LP, respectively.