Estudio del comportamiento del óxido de grafeno como tratamiento superficial en estructuras de hormigón

Laburpena

One of the activities that has the greatest impact on the environment is construction. The high consumption of natural resources derived from it, together with the large production of construction and demolition waste (CDW) that it generates, leads to great environmental pressure. This gives rise to the main challenges facing the conservation of building materials. All these challenges are committed to promoting environmentally sustainable construction by implementing new innovative practices to reduce environmental impact. Therefore, any technique that allows increasing the useful life of the materials used in construction will indirectly achieve a considerable improvement in sustainability, fostering the circular economy. One of the techniques that has been proposed in recent years, aimed at increasing the useful life of construction materials, especially concrete structures, is the use of coatings or surface treatments. Recently, the search for strategies to improve the performance of traditional coatings has played an important role in the emergence of the use of nanomaterials. The feasibility of using different nanomaterials as a complementary material to improve the performance of surface treatments has already been confirmed in recent years by a large number of publications. The authors of this research have evaluated the effect of combining nanomaterials with traditional surface treatments. The results obtained include an improvement in the mechanical, microstructural and durability properties of concrete structures with nanomaterial-modified surface treatments. The extraordinary potential of nanomaterials has led to the study of their viability as the only surface treatment to increase the useful life of concrete structures. The research line of this doctoral thesis is based on the use of new surface treatments formed solely by 2D nanomaterials. The nanomaterial used in this research is graphene oxide (GO), which is one of the most promising 2D materials, thanks to its lamellar structure and atomic thickness, which provide it with an oxygen-rich surface chemistry and good dispersibility in water, making it a potential alternative for the protection of construction materials. In addition, GO is considered to be the most affordable graphene derivative, from an economic point of view allowing large-scale coatings. The use of GO as a surface treatment provides real protection, which represents a new line of improvement in the strength of concrete structures.