DURABILITY AND ACCELERATED AGING TESTS IN CONSTRUCTION PRODUCTS

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article deals with the topic of durability of construction products, taking advantage of the recent Spanish legal provision Real Decreto-Ley 8/2011, which includes the obligation to carry out a technical inspection on residential buildings with more than 50 years. The corresponding European technical entities recommend that a construction product should last for a period of 25 to 100 years, during which it has to satisfy the Essential Requirements of Directive 89/106/EEC. Given this, it raises the question that the manufacturer needs to have a reliable and quick method that allows him to check whether a new product, that wants to manufacture, will show the desired duration. Nowadays, to solve this, there is only one method: to carry out one or several accelerated aging test procedures. In an intuitive approach, an accelerated aging test would be an intensive exposure to the same degrading agents that the product will be exposed in service. Intensive exposure means a dose of degrading agent higher that the product could receive naturally, so that within a short period of a few weeks it would be obtained, over the product, the same effect that would suffer on actual years of natural exposure in service. This article displays several reflections about the troubles to find an accelerated aging test that corresponds to the natural aging. These thoughts have been collected from various researchers and authors. As an example of a construction product, we had in mind the sandwich panel, but the ideas expressed here are applicable to a wide range of construction products.