Contact: Dulce Elizabeth Valdez Madrid
The Sustainable Building Lime (SUBLime) project aims to create innovative lime-based materials for both industrial use for sustainable construction and for conservation of heritage buildings, and the development of cutting-edge means of characterization and modelling of these materials.
The main objective of this branch of the SUBLime project is the 3D microstructural characterization of the current and new generation lime-based mortars and plasters using high resolution X-ray imaging. These models will be used to validate the products’ performance towards efflorescence and damage caused by single salts using accelerated efflorescence and carbonation tests on the lime-based mortars to compare the variability of the damage caused by the different pore structures. The internal and external physical changes will be monitored using dynamic X-ray imaging and ESEM.
The expected outcome of this research will be a complete multi-scale 3D characterization of the mortar’s internal microstructure using high resolution CT scanners to investigate their porosity and pore size distribution, which are rather relevant factors contributing in the salt crystallization phenomena, and greatly influencing the damage caused by salts transport. This will help to understand the efflorescence phenomena in the surface and subsurface of the specimens to formulate in a later research stage a bio-based treatment for the inhibition of salt crystallization in lime-based mortars and the reduction of structural damage. Finally, the accumulated knowledge will provide useful information to propose validation protocols as tools for lime-based and newly developed mortars characterization and testing.
The SUBLime project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Marie Sklodowska-Curie project SUBLime [Grant Agreement n.° 955986]. More information about this project and the SUBLime team can be found here.