Decay effects of pollutants on stony materials in the built environment

Abstract

This review discuss the effects that pollutants have on stony materials applied on the built environment, illustrating different macroscopical products (pathologies) that can affect historical and modern architectural works. The impact of the decay processes is related to the susceptibility of the materials, environmental conditions and the kind of pollutants that degrade building materials. Here are reviewed the main decay processes resulting from the actions of gases, particulate matter and solutions (from wet deposition to capillary rising and including circulating waters such as run-off), showing that besides atmospheric pollution, also pollutants rising from the ground can cause important deterioration on building materials. Following, the use of tracers is considered for the study of pollutant sources and migration, including neoformation minerals (that might also constitute markers of environmental conditions) and chemical tracers, giving special attention to isotopic tracers, namely to proposals regarding the use of some stable and radioactive isotopes for the study of pollutants that have strong potential but have not been tested yet are also presented. At the end of this chapter, some final considerations are made on the problem of durability assessment of materials in the built environment and also on the use of tracers to assess the origin of damaging compounds in the built environment.

Ultra sensitive quantification of Hg2+ sorption by functionalized nanoparticles using radioactive tracker spectroscopy

“…Radioactive isotopes are widely used as tracers in many research fields, namely in medicine [25][26][27] , in vivo experiments [28][29][30] and environmental issues [31][32][33] .…”

Soluble salt sources in medieval porous limestone sculptures: A multi-isotope (N, O, S) approach

“…Curiously enough, given the widespread occurrence of both Na-and K-nitrate salts (nitre, nitratine), alums and Ca-, Mg-, Na-sulphates in building stones (mainly gypsum, thenardite, mirabilite, hexahydrite and epsomite, Flatt, 2002), this combination of tools has, to our knowledge, never been applied before. There is a long record of isotope studies using  34 S signatures of black crusts and other alteration features of building stones and sculptures since the early works in Salt Lake City (Dequasie and Grey, 1970), Venice (Longinelli and Bartelloni, 1978), and Prague (Šrámek, 1980;Buzek and Šrámek, 1985;Buzek et al, 1991; for a more complete bibliography refer to Kloppmann et al, 2011, andSanjurjo-Sanchez &Alves, 2012). The ambiguity of mono-isotope studies (overlap of signatures of a large diversity of sources) can be overcome by combining several tracers.…”

An Overview of the Use of Absolute Dating Techniques in Ancient Construction Materials

“…Additionally, the mortar hardening occurs at rates that range from years to decades [44,45] and low hardening rates will yield radiocarbon ages younger than the mortar age. Moreover, several decay processes usually affect the lime as a result of water present in the built environment (e.g., rainwater and rising dump) causing dissolution and re-crystallization of CaCO 3 [46], being the younger carbon incorporated into the mortar lime and resulting in age underestimation [41].…”