Building Materials: Properties, Performance and Applications

Building material is any material which is used for a construction purpose. Apart from naturally occurring materials, many man-made products are in use. The manufacture of building materials is an established industry in many countries and the use of these materials is typically segmented into specific specialty trades, such as carpentry, plumbing, roofing and insulation work. This new book presents a wide variety of research on issues facing the building industry today. A study on the use of syntactic foams as a building material is presented. The acoustic performance of building materials with respect to their insulative properties is also analyzed. Other topics include the performance of building stones in relation to salt weathering, the behavior of building materials submitted to fire, the problem of microbe invasion into building materials and a study to develop a series of experimental methods to determine the moisture transport and storage properties of building materials.