Establishing the Carbonation Profile with Raman Spectroscopy: Effects of Fly Ash and Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag

Establishing the carbonation profile is of great significance to the prediction of the service life of reinforced concrete structures. In our previous work, Raman spectroscopy was shown to be an efficient tool for characterizing calcium carbonate (CaCO3) polymorphs and their profile in plain Portland cement (PC) matrices. However, as supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), particularly fly ash (FA) and ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBS), are widely used in concrete, establishing the carbonation profile without considering the possible effects of these SCMs could be of little significance to the real world. This paper, thus, investigated the effects of FA and GGBS on the working capacity and reliability of Raman spectroscopy for establishing the carbonation profile in PC blends containing SCMs. The thermogravimetry (TG) analysis was also conducted to verify the results from Raman spectroscopy. The results show that Raman spectroscopy demonstrated a good capacity for differentiating the variation of CaCO3 contents in FA or GGBS blends. However, the incorporation of FA and GGBS into the PC system caused some adverse effects on the quantification of CaCO3 by Raman spectroscopy, which could be attributed to the darker color and weak scatter nature of FA and the high content of glassy phases in GGBS.