On Phase Identification of Hardened Cement Pastes by Combined Nanoindentation and Mercury Intrusion Method

The micro-mechanical properties of hardened cement paste can be obtained by nanoindentation. Phases at different locations can generally be determined by using the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) method and the K-means clustering (KM) method. However, there are differences between analysis methods. In this study, pore structure and porosity of hardened cement paste aged three, seven, and 28 days were obtained by mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP), and their micro-mechanical properties were obtained by the nanoindentation method. A new method, GMM-MIP and KM-MIP, was proposed to determine the phase of hardened cement paste based on the pore structure and nanoindentation results. The results show that GMM-MIP and KM-MIP methods are more reasonable than GMM and KM methods in determining the phase of hardened cement paste. GMM-MIP can be used to obtain reasonable phase distribution. If the micro-mechanical properties of each phase in hardened cement paste do not satisfy the normal distribution, the GMM method has significant defects.