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Historical and old buildings with their distinctively decorated facades constitute an integral part of city centers or villages and create unique architecture. Most of these important buildings are attacked by refurbishment interventions with the use of incompatible modern rendering materials affecting appear of facades and causing their different service life-related problems. To ensure material compatibility between historical rendering materials and newly prepared alternatives requires special attention. Techni...

Old buildings, in particular, those coming from the first half of 20th century often suffer with increased dampness in masonry coming from different sources. Some of them, however, have aesthetically rendered valued facades which are worth saving. For the design of new alternative mortars for renovation interventions, it is essential to obtain properties of original renders. Mechanical properties of mortars are in general assessed on standardized test samples; however, this approach cannot be always well applicabl...

Concrete represents a traditional building material that is commonly applied due to its unique properties, like relatively high compressive strength and long-term durability. Such properties are gained because of its composition consisting of aggregate and cement. The usage of Portland cement, a worldwide available binder with annual production exceeding 4.6 billion tons, brings several environmental loads. One of them is releasing of an important amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Another environment...

Today the use of biomass combustion for the generation electric power is enormously growing. It is due to the worldwide interest in the environmental sustainability and production of renewable energy. With increasing amount of biomass combusted for energy supply, huge quantity of biomass ash is generated worldwide. One of the open questions related to extensive biomass combustion is what we are going to do with this huge amount of biomass ash. Considering both the environmental and economic issues, biomass ash mus...

We focused at the presented study at the valorization of biomass ash as filler in the design and development of new eco-efficient alkali-activated geopolymers. Since coal fly ash is one of the main precursors used for alkali-activated geopolymer production, this research examines the use of biomass ash, which can have comparable chemical composition and physical properties to coal fly ash, and thus can be potentially geopolymerized in the same way. In this study, the wheat straw ash is used together with diatomace...

The buildings energy performance is becoming increasingly important, because of environmental restrictions connected with CO2 emission and rising costs of fuel end energy. Respecting sustainability issues, design of buildings with improved thermal properties and optimum energy performance is preferred, whereas specific attention has to be paid not only to the design of building envelopes, but also to the thermal insulation of buildings subsoil. To obtain buildings with high thermal resistance and sufficient therma...