Freezing point depression and freeze-thaw damage by nanofluidic salt trapping

Tingtao Zhou, Mohammad Mirzadeh, Roland J.-M. Pellenq, and Martin Z. Bazant
Phys. Rev. Fluids 5, 124201 – Published 2 December 2020

Abstract

A remarkable variety of organisms and wet materials are able to endure temperatures far below the freezing point of bulk water. Cryotolerance in biology is usually attributed to “antifreeze” proteins, and yet massive supercooling (<40C) is also possible in porous media containing only simple aqueous electrolytes. For concrete pavements, the common wisdom is that freeze-thaw (FT) damage results from the expansion of water upon freezing, but this cannot explain the high pressures (>10 MPa) required to damage concrete, the observed correlation between pavement damage and deicing salts, or the FT damage of cement paste loaded with benzene (which contracts upon freezing). In this work, we propose a different mechanism—nanofluidic salt trapping—which can explain the observations, using simple mathematical models of dissolved ions confined between growing ice and charged pore surfaces. When the transport time scale for ions through charged pore space is prolonged, ice formation in confined pores causes enormous disjoining pressures via the ions rejected from the ice core, until their removal by precipitation or surface adsorption at lower temperatures releases the pressure and allows complete freezing. The theory is able to predict the nonmonotonic salt-concentration dependence of FT damage in concrete and provides some hint to better understand the origins of cryotolerance from a physical chemistry perspective.

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  • Received 28 July 2020
  • Accepted 9 November 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.5.124201

©2020 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied PhysicsInterdisciplinary Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Tingtao Zhou*

  • Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

Mohammad Mirzadeh

  • Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

Roland J.-M. Pellenq

  • The MIT/CNRS/Aix-Marseille University Joint Laboratory, “Multi-Scale Materials Science for Energy and Environment,” and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

Martin Z. Bazant

  • Department of Chemical Engineering and Department of Mathematics, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA

  • *Present address: Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA; edmondztt@gmail.com
  • bazant@mit.edu

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Vol. 5, Iss. 12 — December 2020

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