The importance of physical parameters for the penetration depth of impregnation products into cementitious materials: Modelling and experimental study

Abstract The performance of impregnation treatments used for protection and remediation of porous building materials relies on sufficient penetration depth. The penetration of sol–gel impregnation products into partially saturated porous material is driven by capillary suction and depends on material properties, such as pore size distribution on one hand, and on the other hand on sol physical properties, viscosity, density, surface tension and contact angle, along with the time in which the sol gels. In this work we analyse, by the way of modelling and experiments, the penetration depth of a sol–gel impregnation product as the function of pore size distribution and sol properties. The main goal is to determine the importance of sol’s physical properties for the penetration depth for a specific pore size, which will serve as a basis of the optimization of impregnation products to maximize their penetration depth. The model is first calibrated in terms of penetration depth and sol uptake by the experimental data obtained from mortar samples each with a specific pore-size distribution. The correlation between penetration depth and physical parameters is then established by the use of Monte-Carlo method. The results show that the most important parameters for the optimization are surface tension, whose influence increases for larger pores, and gelation time, which with decreasing importance for larger pores.