Methodology to Quantify the Water Content of Axisymmetric Cylindrical Cement-Based Material Samples Using Neutron Radiography

Neutron radiography has been used to assess water content and transport in porous media like cement paste, mortar and concrete. This paper presents a methodology to evaluate water content profiles from neutron radiographs of axisymmetric cylindrical samples along the radial direction. Three examples are proposed as potential applications of this methodology: a drying mortar specimen, a sample of fluid cement paste during high-shear flow, and a steel-reinforced mortar specimen with a gap at the steel–mortar interface. In each case, a simulated neutron image is generated to represent experimental data. The proposed methodology is used to back-calculate the water content distribution of the original sample. The proposed approach can accurately quantify the distribution of water in all three theoretical cylindrical samples. For neutron radiographs created using a random distribution of neutron cross-section values for each constituent, emulating the experimental variability of the imaging process, the proposed method was able to quantify the distribution of water along the radial direction with an average error less than 1.5% for the drying mortar specimen, 3% for the cement paste sample during high-shear flow, and 4% for the reinforced sample with a gap at the steel–mortar interface.