Analysis of dryness in cement-based mixture via spectral imaging and dimensionality reduction

Dryness in cement-based mixture can be systematically analyzed using hyperspectral imaging and dimensionality reduction techniques. In this study, we captured the spectral images of cement-water mixture in the near-infrared range and obtained the spectrum as a function of time. The temporal evolution of the spectrum data was analyzed using dimensionality reduction techniques to determine the dryness of cement-water mixture. Since it was found that the standard deviation in each dimension of the dimensionality reduction results decreased with the moisture content, the product of standard deviations also decreased up to 97.7% until the perfect drying of water in the cement-water mixture. The proposed dryness analysis method provides a nondestructive and efficient real-time method for determining dryness of cement-based materials at construction sites.