Special Filler Added Concrete Textural Characterization by Thermal Imaging Based Procedures

Fine and ultra-fine particulate solids products (fillers), inside a concrete, strongly contributes to change final manufactured products characteristics. The effect of fillers, in fact, is to modify the reactivity mechanisms, changing the physic-chemical and mechanical properties of concrete such as workability and water retention. The quantification of such an effect at microscopic scale, in terms of textural structural change of the resulting products is very difficult to detect and quantify. In this paper an innovative approach, based on thermal-imaging, was applied in order to establish a correlation, for the different utilized fillers, among fillers quantity and quality, textural attributes of the resulting material, concrete behaviour during ageing and final mechanical characteristics of the products at 28 days.