Effects of Curing Method on Properties and Salt-Scaling Resistance of Concrete under Lab Testing

This paper presents a study of the effect of curing on the salt-scaling resistance of concrete containing supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) under lab conditions. Two curing methods were examined: moist curing and wrapping in a tight plastic sheet. Wrapping concrete slabs in plastic was adopted to represent curing methods that do not supply the concrete with additional water. The two curing methods produced different scaling results; however, the outcomes did not change in terms of meeting or failing the acceptance limit. Curing in plastic wraps produced higher carbonation depth prior to exposing the sample to the salt solution. This could have contributed, partly, to the higher scaling obtained in wrapped samples, other than the sample with 40% high-calcium fly ash. For this sample, there is evidence that curing using plastic wraps maintained high alkali concentration in the surface concrete, which could have enhanced the pozzolanic activity of the fly ash at the surface.