Measuring permeability of rigid materials by a beam-bending method: III, cement paste

The evolution of permeability and elastic modulus for Type III portland cement pastes with water/cement ratios varying from 0.4 to 0.6 were measured using a beam-bending method. Young's modulus was independently verified by measuring the ultrasonic pulse velocity. The permeability ranged over 2 orders of magnitude, depending on the water/cement ratio and the age of the samples. The advantage of the beam-bending method is that the permeability results are obtained in a few minutes to a few hours, whereas conventional techniques take hours or days to measure permeability of this order of magnitude. More importantly, there is no need to maintain high pressure during the measurement period, so leaks are not a problem.