Temperature induced damage in marble rocks: correlations with physical and mechanical properties

The evolution of physical and mechanical properties of four sets of different marble rocks after different thermal treatments was investigated. Marble rocks are indeed natural stones extensively used during ancient times in many archaeological sites, cultural heritage artefacts and buildings. These rocks can be naturally or anthropically exposed to high temperatures. Consequently, relating their physical properties to temperature induced damage becomes extremely important. Key physical and mechanical properties, such as porosity, seismic wave velocities, electrical resistivity and uniaxial compressive strength were measured before and after thermal treatments with a temperatures range of 200-600 °C. Microstructural observations and optical investigations were used to analyse how temperature induced damage affects the physical measured properties of the different microstructures. The increase of crack density and porosity with temperature was found to be the main causes of degradation of physical properties. A generalized relationship between physical and mechanical properties and thermal induced damage was defined and proposed for a broad suite of marble rocks. The proposed methodology can be applied for modelling the temperature influence on rock behavior in many geological engineering applications.