Portland cement belongs to a family of materials that usually appear as a grey powder composed of several minerals. Upon contact with water a complex series of interconnected reactions takes place whose products are in intimate contact and consequently form a hardened mass. The most effective basis for understanding and controlling the properties of materials is a knowledge of their structure. For cement this has been an elusive task as the structure changes with time and environment and is very difficult to observe. Furthermore, an understanding of the structure of cement is necessarily linked to an understanding of its formation. Although Portland cements may vary in composition, they all contain the following four main constituents:
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Pratt et al. (1981) studied this question.
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