Predict the hydration of Portland cement using differential evolution

The hydration of Portland cement paste has an important impact on the formation of microstructure and development of strength. Manual derivation of cement hydration kinetic equation is very difficult because of the extreme complexity in Portland cement hydration. It can be reversely extracted automatically from the observed time series using evolutionary computation method. However, the physical meaning of coefficients of the extracted kinetic equation can not be understood easily, which limits the scope of application of kinetic equation in predicting hydration reaction. In this paper, in order to predict the reaction process of Portland cement, an evolutionary approach to predict the development of cement hydration using extreme early-age data and differential evolution algorithm is proposed. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method is very suitable for the forecasting of the development of degree of hydration for Portland cement.