CemGEMS – an easy-to-use web application for thermodynamic modelling of cementitious materials

Abstract

Thermodynamic equilibrium calculations for cementitious materials enable predictions of stable phases and solution composition. In the last two decades, thermodynamic modelling has been increasingly used to understand the impact of factors such as cement composition, hydration, leaching, or temperature on the phases and properties of a hydrated cementitious system. General thermodynamic modelling codes such as GEM-Selektor have versatile but complex user interfaces requiring a considerable learning and training time. Hence there is a need for a dedicated tool, easy to learn and to use, with little to no maintenance efforts. CemGEMS (https://cemgems.app) is a free-to-use web app developed to meet this need, i.e. to assist cement chemists, students and industrial engineers in easily performing and visualizing thermodynamic simulations of hydration of cementitious materials at temperatures 0-99 °C and pressures 1-100 bar. At the server side, CemGEMS runs the GEMS code (https://gems.web.psi.ch) using the PSI/Nagra and Cemdata18 chemical thermodynamic data-bases (https://www.empa.ch/cemdata).

The present paper summarizes the concepts of CemGEMS and its template data, highlights unique features of value for cement chemists that are not available in other tools, presents several calculated examples related to hydration and durability of cementitious materials, and compares the results with thermodynamic modelling using the desktop GEM-Selektor code.