Modeling SAOS Yield Stress of Cement Suspensions: Microstructure-Based Computational Approach

Two static yield stress models, one known as YODEL and the newly proposed BreakPro, based on inter-particle bond breaking probability, were employed to comparatively simulate the yield stress of cement suspensions, induced by oscillatory rheological tests with small amplitude oscillatory shear (SAOS). This yield stress occurs at a critical strain in the order of 0.01%, and is commonly attributed to the limit of the linear viscoelastic domain, where attractive forces bridge the cement particles and form a flocculated particle network. YODEL is based on van der Waals (vdW) interaction forces to describe the yield stress for flow onset at a critical strain of a few percent, developed for simple non-reactive particulate suspensions. However, due to the high pH and reactivity of cementitious suspensions, their particle interaction forces are much higher than vdW. Therefore, until now, the YODEL adaptations to cementitious suspensions did not explicitly consider the microstructural-based salient feature of the original model, but used it as an implicit fitting parameter to scale the average attractive force. In this paper, the force is inversely estimated using the full power of the two microstructural-based models, presenting a new mathematical tool for investigating the fragility of the rigid percolated structure of cement suspensions. The model parameters were calibrated on measured yield stresses obtained by SAOS measurements in a high-sensitivity rheometer. The estimated forces were found to be 5.57 (BreakPro) and 1.43 (YODEL) times higher than typical van der Waals forces. The YODEL percolation threshold of 21% turned out to be significantly lower than the one found by the BreakPro model (37%). This indicated that BreakPro modeling assumptions are better suited for the description of yield stress at SAOS critical strain than the YODEL model.