Durability of materials – How to anticipate future damages of materials?

The durability of materials is a strategic methodology to design for robustness and resilience, firstly to ensure and maintain an esthetic aspect of building, and secondly to avoid the high cost generated by material replacement.

Every material or product has its own life expectancy, the defined use of these products should be in line with their life expectancy.

Meanwhile, their durability could be influenced by two main aspects:

• damage caused by traffic cumulated with time
  
• damage caused by material degradation.

This means suitable usage of material, adequate protection, or more consideration of the specificities of different locations can help prevent degradation by local environmental factors. Therefore, the frequency of replacement could be minimized and at the same time maximize the product’s service life.

Commonly, the main actions to considerate are:

 Protect vulnerable parts of the building from damage:

• For areas with high pedestrian traffic such as entrances or public areas, it is important to specify and install suitable materials and indications for these areas.
• For areas with internal vehicular or trolley movement such as storage rooms, delivery areas or waste storage rooms, it is important to implement protection within a certain distance of the building and prevent damage caused by these movements.
• For areas with external vehicular movements such as parking, it is important to implement protection from any potential collision with the building facades or other properties.

Examples of wall angle protection against frequent-traffic-induced damages, from the least obvious to the most obvious style

Protect exposed parts of the building from material degradation:

• Identify the local environmental factors that may have an impact on materials such as solar radiation, temperature variation, wind, moisture or air contaminants, then Incorporate appropriate design and specification measures to limit materials degradation from environmental factors.

TERAO had implemented a methodology to carry out a strategic durability study. If you need this kind of analysis to better anticipate and reduce future damages to materials, feel free to contact us at nieong@teraochina.cn for further information. We would be pleased to explain more about the durability of your asset and contribute to increasing its value.