Doctor of Concrete—Self-healing - The Issues and Discussion of Modern Concrete Science - page 146

Chapter 12
Doctor of Concrete — Self-healing

Self-healing, a little-known property of concrete has been mainly discussed in this
chapter. Self-healing is a kind of repair capacity on concrete defects. Just like a sick
person, he may recover without taking injection or medicine. What kinds of defects
can be repaired by concrete itself? According to summary and research of the
author, concrete has self-healing capacity on frost resistance, impermeability, and
extremely crack. Concrete has repair and elimination function on underlying det-
riments of structural defects, durability, and security, which is an exciting magic
performance. As there are merit and demerits for various performances of concrete,
but for self-healing, few negative effects of self-healing on engineering structure
can be found so far As a result, self-healing is called in this chapter.

Consulting massive literatures and data, self-healing is scarcely mentioned by
experts all the time. Research and summary on this question will be discussed from
discovery of self-healing in the following. It is also a proud summary on engi-
neering experiences of the author over 20 years. Now, an engineer needs to be
thanked, that is Gao Su-mei, who is the previous station master of Inner Mongolia
Quality Supervision Department.

“ doctor ”

12.1 Discovery of Self-curing Phenomenon

In 2002, at an airport construction site, which is located at border of desert in
Xinjiang, the weather is arid, windy, and rainless. We had just

finished a part of

concrete pavement. As concrete had not reached final setting and there suddenly was

a strong wind blowing, a lot of dehydration cracks were created on concrete pave-
ment surface. The wind was so strong that we failed to deal with it at once, so we took
photographs and videos at the field, which documented coordinates of position where

dehydration crack generated. Besides, we cover a cloth and poured water on pave-
ment surface for curing and decided to discuss treatment solution in the next day.
On forenoon of the next day, when opening curing cloth at construction site, we
were surprised to

find that there was no crack on concrete slab surface after curing
for a night. We compared the position coordinates repeatedly and con rmed that

there is no mistake. However, so many serious surface dehydration cracks, which