Degradation of concrete resistance: analysis of a homogeneous area. The city of Caserta

The concept that concrete degrades over time has now been acquired and this leads to a reduction of the resistance. In the case under consideration, an attempt is made to establish a relationship between the time elapsed from construction to the test date with the same environmental conditions, as all samples from the same geographical area were examined. A few dozen results are analyzed, in terms of compressive strength and an attempt is made to draw a relationship between time and reduction of resistance. Where the level of carbonation penetration is also available, an attempt is also made to find a correlation between carbonatation and reduction of resistance in the time. Resistance is measured on samples from the extraction of cores from existing public and private buildings and built over different periods of time. The investigations were carried out in the time interval between 2009 and today for various purposes requested by the owners at the TecnoLab laboratory in Naples which allowed us to access their archive, not disclosing personal customer data. The resistance was assessed both through the direct crushing of the extracted samples and through evaluations with non-destructive methods such as the combined SonReb tests.