Factors affecting the relationship between total porosity and electrical resistivity for concrete repair materials

Abstract EN

The paper examines the properties of five different types of repair and substrate materials, including conventional mortar, fly ash mortar, silica fume mortar, conventional concrete substrate, and high-performance concrete substrate materials.

Assessment was carried out on the basis of some physical properties (total porosity, and electrical resistivity).

These properties were measured at early age and later after 14 weeks of exposure conditions to 6 % (by weight) of sodium chloride solution to simulate typical marine environment.

The results show that the electrical resistivity and total porosity measurements appear to be related and the measurements obtained are affected by the pore structure of the materials.

It is also expresses that if a material has grater proportion of coarse aggregates (e.g.

the substrate concrete in this study) it will appear to have a lower porosity although the porosity of mortar surrounding the aggregates could be higher.

This makes comparisons between materials containing different aggregates proportions and size difficult.