Print Email Facebook Twitter Revealing the dark side of Portlandite Clusters in cement paste by circular polarization microscopy Title Revealing the dark side of Portlandite Clusters in cement paste by circular polarization microscopy Author Copuroglu, O. Faculty Civil Engineering and Geosciences Department Structural Engineering Date 2016-03-08 Abstract Plane and crossed polarization are the two standard light modes in polarized light microscopy that are widely used to characterize crystalline and amorphous phases in cement-based materials. However, the use of the crossed polarized light mode has been found to be restrictive for studying birefringent phases quantitatively due to the extinction phenomenon that arises depending on the crystal orientation. This paper introduces circular polarization microscopy as an alternative technique to overcome the extinction problem during the examination of cementitious materials’ microstructure with optical microscopy. In order to evaluate the feasibility of this technique, selected optical and micromorphological features of portlandite clusters were investigated in cement paste. Image analysis results showed that compared to the conventional crossed polarization technique, circular polarization offers significant advantages when portlandite quantification is of interest, and it stands out as a promising low-cost alternative to backscattered electron microscopy. Subject portlanditecircular polarizationimage analysisconcrete microscopycharacterizationoptical microscopyOA-Fund TU Delft To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1419ea05-6acf-4bbb-a260-f4bc5a0681ed Publisher MDPI ISSN 1996-1944 Source https://doi.org/10.3390/ma9030176 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights (c) 2016 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons by Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Files PDF materials-09-00176.pdf 27.04 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:1419ea05-6acf-4bbb-a260-f4bc5a0681ed/datastream/OBJ/view