Two Examples of Building Sealant and Adhesive Failure

Facades of buildings are measured in the thousands of square meters or thousands of square feet. All of this built environment is negatively affected by poor sealant durability. Similarly, interiors of building also contain numerous uses of adhesives and sealants. Two cases illustrate some common approaches to failure. The first is the failure of adhesive material holding large glass panels. The first case included visual and textural check of the material, Shore Hardness testing, Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) analysis, and Polarized light Microscopy (PLM) analysis. The second case involved testing of polymer-base (PB) material from expansion joints suspected of being damaged from a hurricane event. For the second case, testing included tensile testing, Shore Hardness testing, light microscopy and materials characterization, dimensional evaluation, FTIR spectroscopy, and Pyrolysis Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectroscopy (GC-MS) analysis.