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Percolation Threshold of Capillary Pore Space

Another percolation property of interest in cement-based materials is the percolation threshold of the capillary pore space as a function of hydration [18]. As hydration proceeds and capillary porosity is reduced, a point may be reached where the capillary porosity is no longer connected in three dimensions, exemplifying a percolation transition. As an example, we can consider the fraction of the total capillary porosity which remains connected across the 3-D microstructure as a function of the volume fraction of porosity for the same w/c=0.4 cement paste system considered in the previous example. The datafile used for this execution is provided in Appendix D.3. In this example, the dissolution bias parameter remains at its ``default'' value of 20.0 as we are interested in examining this percolation over a broad range of hydration. Figure 6 provides a plot of the fraction of connected capillary porosity vs. the total volume fraction of capillary porosity during the hydration. The capillary porosity is seen to depercolate at about 20% capillary porosity, in agreement with previous computer modelling [18] and experimental [19] results.