Long-term leaching test of organo-contaminated cement-clay pastes.

The aim of the present work is to investigate the effect of a prolonged leaching test (more than a year) on the microstructure of solidified cementitious wasteforms. A set of four different cement-based monoliths (Ap, Bp, Cp and Dp) was prepared, and for each series an uncontaminated sample was prepared as reference (A-D). An organoclay was added in all pastes as pre-sorbent material for the pollutant; a model liquid organic pollutant, 2-chloroaniline (2-CA), was added only in the contaminated ones and different types of admixtures, chosen among those typically employed in the concrete mix-design, were used. After the first 28 days of curing, all the monoliths, contaminated and uncontaminated, underwent a dynamic leach testing (DLT) for more than 1 year in deionized water.

1H NMR spin-spin relaxation and imaging in porous systems: an application to the morphological study of white portland cement during hydration in the presence of organics.

Proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spin-spin relaxation and imaging have been applied to investigate white Portland cement pastes during hydration in the absence and in the presence of organic solvents. The main organic solvent investigated was methanol, alone or together with the organic waste 2-chloroaniline (2-CA), an aromatic amine representative of an important class of highly toxic compounds. For all the analysed samples, prepared with a solvent-to-cement ratio of 0.4, the decay of the echo magnetization has been fitted by adopting a model that combines an exponential component with a gaussian one. The calculated independent relaxation parameters have been discussed in terms of morphological and dynamical changes that occur during the cement hardening process and pore formation. Three kinds of water molecules: "solid-like" (chemically and physically bound), "liquid-like" (porous trapped) and "free" water, endowed with anisotropic, near isotropic and isotropic motion, respectively, were identified. Spin-echo images collected on the same samples during the hydration kinetics, allowed the changes of water and solvents spatial distribution in the porous network to be monitored, showing percolation phenomena and confirming the multimodal open channels structure of the hardened cement system. Both T(2) relaxation and imaging data indicated that a pronounced delay occurs in the cement hardening when organics are present.