There might be a host of different traits that have tried to define human beings over the years, but none have actually done a better job than our tendency of improving at a consistent pace. This tendency to become better, no matter the situation, has brought the world some huge milestones, with technology emerging as quite a major member of the group. The reason why we hold technology in such a high regard is, by and large, predicated upon its skill-set, which guided us towards a reality that nobody could have ever imagined otherwise. Nevertheless, if we look up close for a second, it will become clear how the whole runner was also very much inspired from the way we applied those skills across a real world environment. The latter component, in fact, did a lot to give the creation a spectrum-wide presence, and as a result, initiate a full-blown tech revolution. Of course, this revolution eventually went on to scale up the human experience through some outright unique avenues, but even after achieving a feat so notable, technology will somehow continue to bring forth the right goods. The same has turned more and more evident in recent times, and assuming one new discovery ends up with the desired impact, it will only put that trend on a higher pedestal moving forward.

The researching team at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has successfully developed a new test, which is designed to test durability of cement in as little as a few seconds to a few minutes. To understand the significance of such a development, we must understand how the said process is carried out today and why it is not exactly efficient. Basically, one can find out the durability of cement by checking its ability to absorb water, as the more porous the cement paste seems, the more water it will absorb, thus triggering corrosion of the embedded rebar in reinforced concrete. Now, this check is currently done through a method named ASTM C1585, a testing process supposed to be performed in controlled lab setting. There, you expose a concrete sample that contains cement paste to water while a technician continuously measures the sorptivity, meaning how much water the sample absorbs and transmits. This measurement is helped by observing the change in cement’s weight for several hours, and in some cases, it can also go on for several days. The last bit should tell you all about the time-consuming nature of our traditional method. Geared towards conceiving a faster timeline, the new test bets on computer vision technology to see how quickly a single water droplet is absorbed into the surface within the first few seconds or minutes and then essentially predict the material’s initial sorptivity.

“Concrete is one of the most consumed materials on our planet, second only to water,” said Nishant Garg, civil and environmental engineering professor at Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Over time, the concrete used to build our infrastructure degrades over time via exposure to deicing salts; freeze and thaw cycles; and ingress of water—all of which can lead to corrosion of the rebar that is used to strengthen the structures. Ultimately, this leads to failure, sometimes catastrophically, as seen in the 2021 condominium collapse in Surfside, Florida, where 98 lives were lost.”

Following the development, the team tested their brainchild on more than 60 different samples, and going by the available details, it was able to emulate results from the conventional ASTM test method in most of those scenarios. Not just drawing level with it, though, the new test also goes a step further by revealing the importance of that initial angle at which water droplets come into contact with cement’s surface.

“The dynamics of absorption change quickly while the water droplets change shape on the surface,” Garg said. “Intricacies like these are all factored into our new test.”

For the future, the team is striving to scale up their discovery and make it compatible with mortars and other iterations of concrete, which are texturally and chemically more complex.

“The key takeaway from the study is that testing the durability of building materials is very slow, tedious and labor-intensive,” Garg said. “With the availability of technologies like computer vision and analysis, we can develop tests that are faster, automated and convenient.”