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Yue Gu [1; 2] and Qianping Ran [2; 3] and Wei She [1] and Jiaping Liu [1; 2; 3]

Academic Editor: Kedsarin Pimraksa

1, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China, seu.edu.cn

2, State Key Laboratory of High Performance Civil Engineering Materials, Nanjing 210008, China

3, Jiangsu Research Institute of Building Science, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210008, China

Received Mar 31, 2017; Accepted May 30, 2017

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

Concrete is still the most widely used construction material in our planet which contributed 8~10% of the worldwide anthropogenic CO2 emission [1, 2]. To reduce the environmental footprint triggered by concrete, one effective strategy is to utilize supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) to replace a portion of cement, the main binder component of concrete. This is particularly significant in a CO2-penalized economy, where the reduced CO2 impact of cement could bring about economic, social, and environmental benefits. SCMs commonly refer to fly ash, ground granulated blasted furnace slag, limestone, and calcined clays. Unfortunately, the addition of SCMs with a high volume would often adversely impact the development of mechanical property, especially at the early age. To overcome the undesired negative consequence, more recently, nanomaterials have been explored as superior filler agents to improve the early age property [3–5]. For instance, Yehdego and Peethamparan [4] revealed that nanomaterials modified high volume fly ash concrete could obtain doubled compressive strength in comparison to pristine unmodified sample at 24 h.

Nanotechnology is in the forefront of materials research, as it changed the traditional vision about the synthesis, modification, and control of materials. To respond to constant curiosity around nanotechnology in cement and concrete research area, various nanoparticles, such as nano-SiO2 [6], nano-Al2O3 [7], nano-TiO2 [8, 9], nanoclay [10], and graphene [11], have been added to enhance the early age properties of cementitious materials. Among all the nanoparticles, the incorporation of nano-SiO2 (NS) into cementitious materials has been most extensively studied and shows the high potential of commercial application, which may be attributed to two main reasons: (1) the affinity...

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