Multiscale carbonation reactions: Status of things and two modeling exercises related to cultural heritage

TL;DR

This paper introduces multiscale modeling of carbonation reactions in cultural heritage, reviewing existing work and presenting two modeling exercises to aid understanding of long-term material behavior in historical structures.

Contribution

It promotes multiscale reaction-diffusion modeling for cultural heritage, encouraging collaboration between mathematicians and experimentalists to address complex long-term carbonation processes.

Findings

Review of multiscale carbonation modeling in concrete

Presentation of two related modeling exercises

Encouragement for interdisciplinary collaboration

Abstract

Having in mind as target audience beginner researchers working in the field of cultural heritage, we present succinctly the concept of two-scale modeling of reaction-diffusion problems as it fits to scenarios where the action of the carbonation reaction is relevant. We briefly review well-known contributions concerning multiscale concrete carbonation processes, and finally, we point out two related multiscale modeling exercises. The scope of these notes is twofold: Promoting the language of multiscale modeling, we invite the applied mathematician to pick some of the target problems from the context of cultural heritage. On the other hand, we invite the experimentalist to talk to the applied mathematician whenever the laboratory experiments are unable to answer questions for instance about the long time behavior of materials exposed to the ingress of various chemical species, humidity, and/or temperature (as it is the case of historical monuments and buildings in urban areas) because modeling and simulation approaches might provide at least provisory hints on what could happen further once measurements stop, or when the situation of interest takes place actually outside the laboratory.