Factorial Design Method for Designing Ternary Composite Cements to Mitigate ASR Expansion

Abstract

Supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) have been successfully employed in binary or ternary cement blends to mitigate alkali-silica reaction (ASR). The determination of composition of binary or ternary composite cement to avoid deleterious expansion of concrete is usually based on a wide range of experiments, and it is time-consuming and costly. This paper introduces a factorial design method, combined with a ternary contour diagram, to correlate the compositions of ternary composite cements with ASR expansions with only seven batches of experiments. Based on the ternary contours, a safe composition range and dangerous composition range can be obtained. Moreover, the ternary contour diagram can also be used to analyze synergetic effects between any two components in the ternary composite cements. Finally, the efficiency of the factorial design method was verified by comparing the experimental and predicted expansions, and the results correlated very well.