Team:SZU-China/Demonstrate
Demonstrate
Experiment
After some days for the drying of concrete mold. Take out the column-like concrete from the mold. Then spilt the concrete right through the sided itches, exposing the microcapsule. Now if we put the two parts of concrete column together by sticking them with a tape, we can build a micro-crack on the upper surface. So we mark these concrete columns and put them into the artificial seawaters for 28 days. And you find the micro-crack on the upper surface be repaired like they never ever existed (as shown in Fig.1)
Fig 1. The comparison of repairing betweenWB800 (shown in upper two figures) and Modified WB800 (shown in under two figures)
And after 20 days, we take some concrete mole, running through the same protocol mentioned previously to see the repairing status (as shown in Fig.2)
This maybe a very limited way to truly understand how the self-healing concrete specifically undergoes. But we believe it is a very important way to achieve this exciting goal. With the success in the concrete-mold1.0, we can adjust our condition and craft concrete-mold 2.0 in the very future.
Application
Instead of just staying in the lab, we want our project to actually help people. Thus we did a lot of surveys and interviews with both villagers who build their own house and the engineer of HONGKONG-ZHUHAI-MACAO BRIDGE which is the longest cross-sea bridge in the world. We want to get to know the problem they met when building the constructions on different angles.
When we were doing surveys in Chendian Village, Chaonan District, Shantou, Guangdong. We came to know that cracks are really common among the neighborhood, there were even advertisements of helping strengthen the building on the street. With the common concrete and building technology they used cracks are inevitable. They don’t have regular checking system, and a lot of them don’t think they need to be repair even the visible cracks. But the capacity is usually very big. This is not safe enough in our opinion. But if they use our concrete to build their house, with the damp weather and rain water, their cracks can be fixed by our self-healing system. They still don’t need to have regular checks, but this time there won’t be any potential safety hazard for the residents.
Also, the deputy engineer of the HONGKONG-ZHUHAI-MACAO BRIDGE received our interview. They do have a lot of advanced devices for example chloridion detector to monitor the cracks, but none self-healing devices. Thus our self-healing system is definitely what they want.
