The choice to rehabilitate aging infrastructure rather than start new builds shifts costs to maintenance and repair. Being integral to most projects, concrete ages, erodes, and cracks. To combat this the materials industry has developed repair mortars and identified minimum requirements for strength, compatibility with the substrate, and protection of the structure. With lots of different retrofitting materials available, what combinations work best to repair and ensure continued sustainability? Researchers explored how different properties affect the durability of repair mortars for a paper in the Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering.
The ideal solution is a technology that provides adequate protection of concrete substrate, while improving both its mechanical and durable performance. In “Durable Performance of Cement-Based Repair Mortars for Retrofitting and Protection Applications,” authors María Rodríguez-Marcos, Rosalía Pacheco-Torres, Jaime Fernández-Gómez and Paula Villanueva–Llaurado compared cement-based repair mortars to traditional mortars and tested applying each to fiber-reinforced cementitious matrix materials systems. Learn how these findings can extend the sustainability of existing infrastructure at https://doi.org/10.1061/JMCEE7.MTENG-18726. The abstract is below.
Abstract
Environmental concern and damage of aging concrete structures have fostered the worldwide use of repair mortars, which can be associated with retrofitting materials. The effectiveness of reparations depends on intrinsic properties of the mortar and environmental exposure. Present research compares different technologies of cement-based repair mortars (traditional portland, polymer, and polyurethane modified) and their performance: (1) mechanical properties; (2) adherence when serving as a matrix for FRCM composites; and (3) durability performance. Results reveal that mortars identified in the study as MB and MD exhibit high performance at different levels, being appropriate for applications where both durability and structural performance are critical. This is a novel approach in which two approaches that are rarely put together are adopted for the same materials.
Delve into the test results and how they might benefit your concrete maintenance in the ASCE Library: https://doi.org/10.1061/JMCEE7.MTENG-18726.
