Latest revision as of 10:51, 15 October 2025

Abstract

Concrete is by far the most produced material in the world, at around 15 billion tonnes per year [1]. Given the scale of production and the associated use of cement, the concrete industry is a large CO2 emitter, responsible for more than twice the CO2 emissions of global aviation [2, 3]. Consequently, concrete offers significant potential for climate impact mitigation by reducing the embodied CO2 per kilogram of material [4]. Concrete consists mainly of sand, gravel, water, and Portland cement clinker, with the latter being the main source of its high global warming potential. Therefore, the ongoing research effort is to minimise the amount of clinker in concrete by pursuing two different strategies: the development of alternative binders and the optimisation of concrete composition. This study follows the latter approach. Optimising concrete composition requires a detailed understanding of the interparticular forces that occur. These forces are complex, and an efficient yet accurate strategy is required to predict and investigate their effects on small scales, with the aim of upscaling to concrete in the future. Therefore, this study investigates the linear viscoelastic contact model with adhesion forces to capture the interactions between cement clinker, limestone filler, and quartz sand in an alkaline solution. The contact model is then used to simulate the packing problem with three distinct materials. The resulting packing density is compared to the same simulation, without interparticular forces.

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