Measurement of advancing and receding contact angles between mercury and cement-based materials

The selection of the incorrect value of contact angles is one of the important error sources in calculating the pore size in mercury porosimetry studies. However, from literature, it is difficult to find out an appropriate technique, which can be used to measure both advancing and receding contact angles. In this paper, a new method is proposed to measure the advancing and receding contact angles between mercury and cement-based materials. This method is demonstrated with a measurement on Portland cement paste with the water-to-cement ratio of 0.3. This method can give very consistent results with the standard deviation lower than 1 %. The measured advancing and receding contact angles range from 131.7° to 138.6° and from 123.3° to 128.2°, respectively, as curing age increases from 3 days to 28 days.