ABSTRACT
Three full-scale one floor models were constructed in 1990 by the authors. The buildings exposed in a polluted area are being used as an outdoor laboratory to study the durability of masonry walls and of protection and consolidation treatments. The walls are made part with softmud bricks and part with serena sandstone from Firenzuola.
The indoor and outdoor environment is constantly controlled in order to correlate the effect of the aggressive agents as frost-defrost action, salt crystallization and pollutants to their direct causes. Furthermore the interaction between mortars, bricks and stones in a real wall are also studied.
Some artificial damages like capillary rise of water and sodium sulfate attack were induced in the walls in order to accelerate the damage.
The authors are presenting the results of the calibration processes concerning their laboratory crystallization tests and their procedure for the continuous measurement of surface decay with a laser profilographer.
