Dauti et al.8 reported that a noticeable increase in the water content was observed ahead of the drying front when evaluating Portland cement concrete samples with no impermeable ceramic casings. However, it was not identified whether such increase were associated with real moisture accumulation or the “beam hardening” effect, which is the screening of more energetic neutrons by the hydrogen scattering on the water-rich positions, as it can mainly take place when lateral drying occurs. Tengattini et al.11, tried to use quartz and titanium as the enclosing casing, which was not successful. This might be related to differences in the thermal expansion of the casing and the sample, resulting in some air gaps at the materials interface from where water could still escape (see Fig. 5). Thus, the alumina ceramic casing used in this present work was specifically selected to match the characteristics of the 5CAC composition and result in a true unidimensional drying. Fig. 4 describes the relative difference in water distribution for samples with and without the ceramic casing. Three main conclusions can be readily drawn from these results: (i) the drying front is completely flat when the sample is cast inside the alumina casing (ii) the water accumulation is more evident in the sample inside the ceramic jacket and (iii) a secondary drying front is observed on the bottom of this sample. This set of results is important and confirms some observations as well as juxtaposes others. First, the secondary drying is an important effect to be observed. Even in this case where the sample size is small, and numerical simulations indicate that the temperature gradient is around 17°C, this secondary drying is observed indicating that in real life applications, this can be an important way to guarantee a safe and efficient drying. Fig. 4. Relative water content difference with respect to the initial state for samples with and without a ceramic casing for different time steps. As a matter of fact, in industrial equipment containing ceramic linings, weepholes are often drilled on the metallic outer shells to allow water withdrawn, which often is observed as a liquid stream, or in some cases even as water jets. The current findings are not in tune with the conclusions presented by Barakat et al.10, as these authors only observed minor increases in the saturation content, and claimed that it could not be related to moisture clog, as the samples and the thermal gradients were too small. As the NMR results can be spatially visualized, one can only infer that the procedures taken by Barakat et al.10 to enforce the unidimensional drying were not enough, due to the different thermal expansion coefficient of the evaluated refractory castable and the PTFE beaker used as the casing for the NMR tests10. Fig. 5 shows the linear expansion