Environmental Effects on Physical and Mechanical Properties of Ornamental Stones

Rock has always been used as building material and represents, undoubtedly, one of the first durable construction materials so much so that some of the building belonging to our historical heritage and built even in ancient ages have been preserved to this day. Even today, ornamental stones are used in the field of art and architecture not only for interior design purposes but also as, for example, outer shell of ventilated facades of important buildings. Ornamental stones, and especially calcareous rocks, when in contact with atmospheric agents such as acid rain and temperature variations are subjected to a progressive chemically and physically alteration that induce a degradation of the physical and mechanical properties of rocks by posing serious problems of durability and resistance of the rock material. In this lecture, a multiscale approach is presented for the analysis of the progressive degradation of the physical and mechanical properties of some types of marble subject to chemically aggressive environments and temperature variations -starting from microscale analysis of complex natural materials, through laboratory tests arrives at the study of the structural element with simplified models based, however, precisely on experimental evidence.