Self Healing Concrete

Self Healing Materials is a new research area that gets a lot of attention in recent years. Self Healing Concrete is a term that is used for cement-based materials that repair themselves after the material or structure gets damaged due to some sort of deterioration mechanism.

In this blog we will update you on the progress of the Self Healing Concrete projects running in the section Materials & Environment and the Microlab of the faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences of Delft University.


This blog contains a description of the running projects that are financed by AgentschapNL, DCMat, STW and industrial partners. Also a page "Literature & Videos" is included where a lot of publications can be found.


Sunday 27 November 2011

Porous Network Concrete beam tested

Last week Senot tested some of the beams made with Porous Network Concrete. The beams have a core of porous concrete that can be used to inject a self healing agent and repair cracks. The beams are tested in 3-point bending. After the first loading a self healing agent (in this case epoxy containing fluorescent dye) is manually injected into the porous core.

In a real application the epoxy can be a cement grout and the injection can be automatic after the cracks have been found by embedded sensors.

The internal porous core is filled completely by the epoxy as can be seen in the image of a cross section below:


After injection of the epoxy the specimen is again loaded in 3-point-bending. The specimen is much stronger now and new cracks are formed as shown in the figure below. This photo is made after the tests when the specimen is cut. It clearly shows that the crack that is formed during the first loading is filled completely with epoxy. The new cracks from the second loading step are not filled.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)