Abstract:
This work was designed to investigate the simultaneous effect of both water-to-cement (W/C) and polymer-to-cement
(P/C) ratios on flexural strength of type V Portland cement pastes containing polyvinyl alcohol. The obtained results
confirmed the strong effect of W/C-ratio on the effectiveness of the added polymer so that there exist optimum values
for both W/C and P/C-ratios. Pastes prepared at optimum W/C and P/C-ratios of respectively 0.30 and 0.016 exhibited
the highest flexural strength which was more than two times the strength of unmodified pastes. Further measurements
on hardened paste specimens prepared at W/C=0.30 show that increasing the P/C-ratio increases dry bulk specific
gravity of the specimens and result in significant reductions in both total permeable pore volume and water absorption
of the specimens confirming the effective packing caused by polyvinyl alcohol acetate.
