Cement paste is a hydraulic binding agent made of water and cement. It provides the concrete with its solid matrix when hardened. The hardening of the cement paste relies on an exothermic chemical process known as hydration. The progress of hydration and the associated development of mechanical material properties depend primarily on the materials' composition and hydration temperature. These circumstances were taken into account in the design of this experimental study by varying the water-to-cement ratio and the specimen size. A test series on cement paste made with ordinary Portland cement was conducted using the ultrasonic pulse transmission method with combined compression and shear-wave measurements. Specimens up to 1.5 litres in size were examined. Additionally, density and temperature tests were conducted to describe the specimen's state before, during, and after the ultrasound tests. All measurement data and metadata were compiled into datasets in the open-source binary format of GNU Octave, published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
John Harden (Fri,) studied this question.