Self-sensing of Portland Limestone cement pastes without functional fillers

Mohammad Al-Qaralleh

doi:10.6180/jase.202608_31.057

Self-sensing of Portland Limestone cement pastes without functional fillers

Civil Engineering

MohammadAl-Qaralleh^1,2This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

¹Civil Engineering Department, University of Tabuk, Tabuk, SA

²Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Mutah University, Karak, Jordan

Received: December 9, 2025
Accepted: February 9, 2026
Publication Date: March 14, 2026

Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.202608_31.057

Portland Limestone Cement (PLC) has been recently widely accepted in the construction industry as a replacement to the Ordinary Portland Cement (OPC). PLC was found to exhibit comparable mechanical strength to the OPC, and its production reduces the emissions of greenhouse gasses. However, the intrinsic self-sensing capability of PLC pastes without conductive fillers remains poorly understood. Self-sensing is the correlation between mechanical loading and changes in intrinsic electrical properties of the cement paste. This work investigates the piezopermittivity and piezoresistivity of the PLC paste and compares it with OPC paste. For this study, 3 specimens of PLC paste were prepared by mixing water and cement with a ratio of 0.35 and with dimensions of 60×60×10 mm. The specimens were tested under low-level cyclically-increasing compressive stress. Surface-mounted aluminum electrodes connected to an LCR meter were employed to monitor the change in the capacitance and resistivity of the specimens. The results reveal that PLC paste exhibit moderate yet unstable electrical sensitivity to the mechanical loading. It also shows irreversible electrical evolution under cyclic loading which suggests an accumulative microstructural changes contrary to its OPC counterparts. Under 2 kPa of compressive stress, the PLC specimens show an average fractional change of-0.053%, and 0.23% for capacitance and resistance, respectively. These findings suggest that while PLC demonstrates sensitivity to low-level mechanical loading in the elastic range. However, its long-term self-sensing stability may be limited due to the accumulation of the microstructural changes.

Keywords: Structural health monitoring; Damage detection; Capacitance-based sensing; Piezopermittivity.

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