Roadmap across the mesoscale for durable and sustainable cement paste - A bioinspired approach

In recent years, continuum and atomistic modeling of cementitious materials has provided significant advances towards studying the durability of civil infrastructure. An important frontier to understanding structure-property relationships is the “mesoscale”, which represents the bridge between underlying (e.g. molecular) processes and bulk macroscale behavior. This review highlights examples of a mesoscale approach within biological materials and emphasizes their applicability to the study and design of sustainable cement-based materials at multiple length scales. We propose a methodology focused on the coupling of computation and experiment for furthering our understanding of the microstructural properties that control the durability of hardened cement paste.