INSIGHT
Repair material must be given sufficient open time for good placement.
Correcting structural repair
By Eamonn Ryan
The purpose of a structural repair is typically to restore concrete to its original purpose, be it a column, beam, or any concrete part of a structure that has become‘ off spec’, has been damaged, or has deteriorated.
According to EU stats, says Brian Dillon, director of Stanton Construction Chemicals, more than half of all structural repairs fail, with cementation being the overwhelming fault. He offers some practical tips on how to get your structural repair right the first time by proper assessment and workmanship.
“ Concrete repair is essentially a method of taking new repair material and adding it to older material by forming a multilayer composite system that will behave like a monolithic or single block, so it can handle the required service loads and environment. Why this is needed is because things do occur on site— in fact, there are an alarming number of repairs needed,” explains Dillon.
Why repairs fail
In an ideal world, concrete would not fail if correctly prepared. Yet it does, due to the fact that a site has a large number of variables. For the same reason, repair jobs also often fail. Dillon spells out the most common reasons for the failure of repair actions as: incorrect design; incorrect diagnosis of the root cause; incorrect design of the subsequent repair; incorrect choice of the applied repair material; and poor workmanship— the provider’ s technical data sheet.
28- CEC September 2018