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 their 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 materials degradation.

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

Commonly, the main actions to considerate are:

 Protect vulnerable parts of building from damage:

  • For areas with high pedestrian traffic such as entrance or public area it is important to specified and install suitable materials and indications for these areas.
  • For area with internal vehicular or trolley movement such as storage room, delivery areas or waste storage room, it is important to implement protection within certain distance of building and prevent damage caused from these movements.
  • For areas with external vehicular movements such as parking, it is important to implement protection from any potential collision with the buildings 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 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 the future damages of 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 increase its value.

 

 

 

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