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Moisture ingress is one of the major deteriorating factors for building materials. Today, the only approved way to assess such damage is the gravimetric Darr method, which is essentially destructive. Substantial progress has been made using the geophysical complex-resistivity method, which can be applied non-destructively and provides spatial information along two-dimensional sections, rather than punctual along one borehole. Considerable advantages of complex resistivity are its sensitivity to textural properties, as well as the pore-fluid chemistry of wet, porous media. In a comprehensive laboratory study, and later in field scale experiments, it could be shown that complex resistivity may even be able to distinguish between salt content and saturation degree in a single measurement. A comparison with complementary nondestructive testing techniques points to the benefit and further research to be explored in multimethodical approaches.
Building stones are porous media and they can deteriorate through moisture ingress and secondary damage such as crystallization of soluble salts. Not only is this due to the increasing number of flood events in the past years but also structural damages of houses from activity such as leakage or rising moisture (groundwater) are the main causes. The potential benefit of several nondestructive testing methods to assess water damage in building stone has been studied in a field-scale experiment. Three testing walls made of fired clay brick, sandstone, and spongilite were flooded and their drying behavior monitored using infrared thermography, complex resistivity, ground penetrating radar, and ultrasonics. The results were compared to the average moisture content determined by gravimetric weighing of the specimens. Qualitatively, the results of the different nondestructive testing methods matched well. But in terms of quantitative data, some scatter was observed and the results should be viewed with care. Collecting time-consuming calibration data would help to overcome this problem, but especially when dealing with historic building structures, this is not always possible in practice.
Moisture measurement methods
(2016)
Moisture can cause imperfect sealings, faulty roof constructions, cracks and other kind of damages. For measuring the moisture in construction materials like concrete and screed, there are destructive(direct) and non-destructive(indirect) methods, that can be used. This presentation gives an overview and a comparison of these methods.
We have compared the performance of the typical Darr and CM moisture testing techniques, which are destructive with several non-destructive testing techniques on two types of floor screeds. In case of cement based screeds these destructive tests failed to deliver reliable results. Moreover, our measurements indicate significantly different drying and moisture transport behavior for the investigated cement based and calcium-sulphate based screeds. Whereas we have strong with depth decreasing moisture gradients in the CT material, we observe in the penetrated volumes of our ndt methods basically no clear moisture gradient in the CA samples. The findings with ndt methods could be supported by moisture gradient studies with nuclear magnetic resonance measurements.
Eight different screed types are tested including two different sample heights of 35 and 70 mm. The moisture of the four cement based and four sulphate based screeds are monitored during hydration and evaporation. All samples are stored in a climatic chamber at 23◦ C and 50 % relative humidity. Embedded sensors like temperature arrays, humidity sensor arrays, and multi-ring electrodes are embedded in the samples to yield a detailed moisture evolution with high depth resolution. Furthermore, nuclear magnetic resonance is used to quantify the water content at different depths. This multi-sensor approach allows a comprehensive monitoring of the moisture and its gradient in the different screed samples. This yields a deeper insight into the hydration, moisture convection, and diffusion processes.
Non-destructive testing methods are mostly applied and established for the detection of embedded mounting parts or structural defects in building elements. The assessment of the concrete microstructure or microstructural changes like chemical alterations or the formation of microcracks, e.g. due to material aging, freeze-thaw cycles, alkali-silica reaction and ettringite, is not in the focus of ndt research though. Concrete moisture and enhanced salt contents, which usually trigger all chemical microstructural changes, are other material properties, lacking reliable ways of measuring. But, the assessment of such material properties, on the long term also in a depth resolved manner, is definitely important, when the sustainability of our concrete infrastructure buildings shall be evaluated.
New consideration like the potential use of ndt, in particular the combination of different methods and alternate ways of data analysis are subject of research currently undertaken at BAM. These approaches involve for example working towards (i) a deeper understanding of how to measure moisture distributions reliably and follow transport phenomena, (ii) the use of stray phenomena in radar and ultrasound to locate material inhomogeneities or (iii) the application of LIBS for the delineation of diffusion and migration processes but also (iv) the use of new tools for data analysis like data fusion. First results are presented and new ideas discussed.
Measuring the moisture content of floor screeds is usually done with minor destructive testing methods like Darr drying or the Calcium Carbid (CM) method. These require small samples, deliver only punctual information and still have proven not to be very reliable. Hence, a study has been made using the standard destructive tests as well as a suite of non-destructive testing methods working out their use for moisture determination. In this study five partners from research institutes and industry worked together and intensively researched different technologies. The main focus was put on the varying sensitivity of the measuring techniques in different moisture ranges. Especially for low moisture contents ( or ‘critical’ moisture contents when the screed is dry enough to be covered with the final floor finish), several commercial devices including the most commonly used CM-method failed to determine the correct moisture content for cementitious samples. Hence the need for more accurate, if possible non-destructive methods is high, taking also into account that the chemistry (and physical properties) of screeds may vary strongly depending on their origin and purpose.
Moisture and salt loads of concrete can significantly change its microstructure and consequently lead to chemical and mechanical degradation. However, the non-destructive investigation of moisture and salt present in concrete is still difficult. In order to address and compare the sensitivity of different methods concrete samples with different pore systems realized by varying the w/z ratios have been fabricated. The focus of this study was put on the analysis of ultrasonic long and trans waves measured on the surface and in transmission mode. The results show clear dependencies of all applied methods. With the radar and microwave methods predominantly changes in the concrete moisture could be detected, whereas the different pore systems were not observed to alter the signals. In contrast for the ultrasound method also the ongoing hydration as well as the nature of the pore system strongly influenced the signals. As a consequence in a subsequent drying experiment it was also tried to delineate the effects of moisture and hydration. All specimens have been re-saturated under pressure and the drying experiment was repeated using the same multi-sensor approach.
In this ongoing research project, we study the influence of moisture damage on Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) in different floor constructions. For this purpose, a measurement setup with interchangeable layers is developed to vary the screed material (cement or anhydrite) and insulation material (glass wool, perlite, expanded and extruded polystyrene), as well as the respective layer thickness. The evaluation of the 2 GHz common-offset radar measurements is focused on the extraction of distinctive signal features that can be used to classify the underlying case of damage without any further information about the hidden materials or layer thicknesses. In the collected dataset, we analyze the horizontal distribution of A-scan features in corresponding B-scans to detect water in the insulation layer. Furthermore, possible combinations of these features are investigated with the use of multivariate data analysis and machine learning (logistic regression) in order to evaluate the mutual dependencies. In this study, the combination of an amplitude- and frequency-based feature achieved an accuracy of 93.2 % and performed best to detect a damage in floor insulations.