Society of Concrete Petrographers

Please join us for our SCP meeting in Indianapolis during the ASTM meeting. The meeting will be held at the JW Marriott - Room 201 on Tuesday from 6:30 to 8:00.

We will have a presentation by Karl Peterson of the University of Toronto. The presentation title and description follows.

"Combined vacuum/high-pressure fluorescent epoxy impregnation and microscopy of geo-materials after mechanical testing"

Fluorescent microscopy techniques are widely used in the assessment of concrete materials, but seldom used in the field of rock fracture. For the observation of fractures, many researchers have turned to x-ray computed tomography (CT). X-ray CT provides excellent three-dimensional information, but often with poor resolution, due to limitations imposed by the dimensions of the tested materials. The high resolution of a petrographic microscope allows for a more detailed examination of fractures. After mechanical testing, test specimens may easily break apart, so it is necessary to stabilize the material with epoxy prior to production of thin sections. Combined vacuum/high-pressure impregnation is a versatile technique popularized by a private materials testing firm, and implemented here with standard equipment common to most universities or testing laboratories. After impregnation with fluorescent epoxy, the samples are prepared in thin section, and images recorded with a petrographic microscope equipped with a excitation/barrier filters, a low power objective, and a manual xy stage. Results are compared with slices from x-ray CT reconstructions from the same sample.