Hydrothermal Aging and Bonding Properties of a New Room Temperature Cured Structural Adhesive in Building Components
his paper firstly explores the hydrothermal aging performance of a new room temperature cured structural adhesive at four different levels of relative humidity through dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA). The results show that the strengthening effect of post-curing was stronger than weakening effect of humidity. Then, the Arrhenius equation was introduced to calculate the ratio of the apparent activation energy of this adhesive at the glass transition temperature before and after hydrothermal aging. The little change of the ratio suggests that the adhesive boasts a strong resistance to hydrothermal aging. In addition, the adhesive was tested on concrete structures at room temperature to observe its repairing effect of concrete cracks. The observations reveal that the compressive strength of the cracked concrete block repaired by the adhesive was as high as 90.5% of that of the intact concrete block. Furthermore, the adhesive was used to bond rebars to concrete under three different constant tensile speeds. The results demonstrate that the bonding effect was better under slow constant loading.