Influence of preparation method on the performance of ternary blended cements

This paper examined the feasibility of preparing high performance gap-graded blended cements by adding fine and coarse supplementary cementitious material (SCM) fractions into commercial Portland cement, and the efficiency of SCMs in gap-graded blended cements and interground blended cements were comparatively evaluated. The results show that the particle size distribution of gap-graded blended cements was much closer to a Fuller distribution, due to the intentional addition of fine and coarse SCMs, resulting in a higher initial packing density. As granulated blast furnace slag (GBFS) was mainly arranged in the fine fraction of the gap-graded blended cements, its efficiency was increased dramatically, contributing to 43.5% of the total measured hydration products. As a result, gap-graded blended cement pastes presented a homogeneous and dense microstructure due to “grain size refinement” and “pore size refinement”, therefore their setting times were decreased significantly, and both early and late strengths were increased remarkably in comparison to the interground blended cements investigated in this study.