Monolithic waste materials (e.g. Portland cement treated wastes) in many field scenarios do not remain continuously saturated, but experience intermittent wetting interspersed with periods of storage in an unsaturated environment. During storage, the matrix may loss moisture to the environment, promoting precipitation or redistribution of species. In addition, the matrix may react with the surr...

Exposed geo−infrastructures filled with compacted soils experience cyclic wetting–drying effects due to environment and underground water fluctuations. Soil physical mechanical behaviors are prone deterioration a great extent, e.g., swelling, collapse, or even slope failure, resulting in huge losses human life, safety, engineering construction. In this paper, hydraulic loading tests of cycles w...

Motivated by the puzzle of sorption hysteresis in Portland cement concrete or cement paste, we develop in Part II of this study a general theory of vapor sorption and desorption from nanoporous solids, which attributes hysteresis to hindered molecular condensation with attractive lateral interactions. The classical mean-field theory of van der Waals is applied to predict the dependence of hyste...