Abstract:
Realizing green and low-carbon development will be a new requirement facing the coal industry. In order to address this problem, this paper proposed a method of preparing foam concrete using a supercritical CO
2 phase change foaming technology, and a Portland cement-based supercritical CO
2 foamed concrete with both high pore structure and carbon sequestration capacity was prepared. The effects of supercritical CO
2 on the dry density, pore structure and carbon sequestration capacity of the material and its mechanism were investigated. The experimental results revealed that the supercritical CO
2 phase change foamed concrete preparation process is a temperature-pressure dynamic coordination process considering Portland cement properties and its reaction properties with CO
2 mineralization. The mechanism of Portland cement-based foamed concrete prepared by the supercritical CO
2 phase change foaming technology may be divided into four stages: CO
2-cement slurry coexistence, CO
2-cement slurry co-solution, supercritical CO
2-cement slurry co-solution, and unpressurized foaming. Increasing the experimental pressure can increase the CO
2 concentration in the supercritical CO
2-concrete system and reduce the dry density of supercritical CO
2-foamed concrete, which varies from 787.14 to 993.52 kg/m
3 with a range of 8.28% to 19.20%. The development of porosity of supercritical CO
2 foamed concrete was affected by the diffusion-dissolution behavior of CO
2 in the supercritical CO
2-concrete system, and its porosity was 47.87%−89.79%. Increasing the experimental pressure and optimizing the holding time are the development direction for preparing supercritical CO
2 foamed concrete with high porosity. The supercritical CO
2 foamed concrete has uniform, regular and independent circular pores with approximately the same pore diameter of 0.2 mm. Increasing the experimental pressure can promote the degree of CO
2 mineralization reaction and effectively optimize the structure and distribution density of the pores. Each tonne of supercritical CO
2 foamed concrete has a carbon sequestration capacity of 6.32%−10.36% in the skeleton and 0.98−2.27 kg in the pore, which has obvious carbon sequestration potential, but the preparation process and parameters still need to be further improved. The results show that the supercritical CO
2 foamed concrete is expected to be developed into a functional material with near-zero-carbon for mining, which is of great significance for realizing the carbon reduction at the source of coal power integration base.