News

I am super happy to share that after more than two years of dedicated work, our paper titled Exploring the Potential of Nonclassical Crystallization Pathways to Advance Cementitious Materials has been FINALLY published in Chemical Reviews! We sincerely hope that the crystallization insights shared in here will inspire cement scientists and catalyse progress towards more sustainable construction materials.

Over the past two decades, alternative theories have revolutionized our understanding of crystalline material formation beyond traditional textbook concepts. Known as Nonclassical Crystallization Pathways, these models reveal critical intermediate stages—such as solute ion associates, dense liquid phases, amorphous intermediates, and nanoparticles—between ions in solution and final crystalline phases.

Applied to the formation of cementitious phases, the multi-step nature of Nonclassical Crystallization Pathwaysoffers exciting new avenues to control the formation binding phase and to modulate the properties of the resulting cement matrix, for example, by the strategic use additives to influence specific stages of phase formation.

Thanks to the contributions of many scientists, some of whose work is highlighted in our paper, we now have unprecedented insights into the mechanisms behind binding phase formation. Extensive research into nucleation, self-assembly processes and bio-inspired materials, together with advances in experimental and computational techniques, provide a solid foundation for the manipulation of cementitious materials at the nano- and microscale, with the potential to deliver more advanced cementitious materials with reduced reliance on Portland cement.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemrev.3c00259