Robust Inverse Design of Cementitious Materials for Biogenic Degradation Resistance

Cementitious materials in infrastructure undergo coupled chemical, mineralogical, transport and mechanical deterioration, yet development still largely follows a forward trial-and-test paradigm. This study formulates the problem as constrained robust inverse materials design over experimentally bounded design spaces. Published data on biological degradation, ye’elimite–aluminate–calcium (YAC) binders, modified CA₂ and calcium aluminoferrites were reorganized without imputing missing observations. Mechanism–material relations were made explicit through an evidence-constrained compatibility matrix, while mechanical and processing requirements defined feasible regions evaluated by minimum-intervention, Pareto and robustness analyses. Fluorine-modified CA₂ combined a synthesis temperature of 1200 °C with 67.76% hydration at 28 days and was the only non-dominated measured state in that subspace. Its guaranteed two-objective robust-dominance radius was ±4.0%; in 100,000 Monte Carlo realizations, it remained Pareto-efficient in 100% of cases for perturbation levels up to ±10%. In the mechanical subspace, YAC Variant II reached 32.1 MPa after one day and 60.2 MPa after 90 days, while CEM I 52.5R retained the highest mature strength; both were non-dominated. Calcium-aluminoferrite data demonstrated a reachable composition–processing phase field. The framework organizes degradation knowledge and phase controllability into candidate-selection decisions and suggests a basis for incorporating phase-, microstructure- and nanoscale descriptors when matched experimental data are available.