Is colour change a good measure of a water penetration front?

Abstract

GARField nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) profiling is used to demonstrate that the sharp colour change boundary commonly used to locate the water front in cement and concrete capillary absorption tests is a poor indicator of the true depth of water penetration. Across a range of mortars and concretes, NMR invariably shows a smooth and often near-zero gradient in the degree of saturation at this boundary. Any sharp front that does exist, as might arise from a strong dependence of the effective diffusivity on concentration and a multi-modal pore size distribution on the nanoscale, is always far beyond the colour change line.