Climatically induced cycles of temperature and moisture content may result in the weathering of building stone through various mechanisms. It is now increasingly possible that, in response to changing climatic conditions, patterns of moisture movement along with thermal gradients within building stone will significantly be altered and increase in complexity. To understand the ongoing dynamically varying micro-environmental conditions in and around stone masonry and to predict future trends, there is a growing need to continuously monitor environmental parameters that control weathering mechanisms in stone. Despite rather advanced non-destructive methods currently used for assessing the deterioration process in stone, the fate and extent of inner contamination remains largely unaccounted for by such methods. Therefore, real-time monitoring of spatial and temporal variations in environmental parameters of building stone is invaluable, not only from the standpoint of economic planning and maintenance, but also on cultural, technical and scientific grounds. This thesis studies the spatial and temporal variations in moisture and temperature conditions in building stone using electrical resistance based sensors. The experimental work reported in this thesis has been carried out to simultaneously address two strands of research viz., 1) To study temperature and moisture changes in building stone in response to variations in simulated and natural micro-environmental conditions and 2) To develop electrical resistance based monitoring technique for long-term monitoring needs of stone masonry structures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:728666 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Srinivasan, Sudarshan |
| Publisher | Queen's University Belfast |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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