The Need to Uplift Quality Control and Quality Assurance for Specialized Concrete Crack Repair in the South African Construction Industry

Abstract

Concrete patch repair is becoming an important facet of the civil construction industry when considering the large quantity of exposed concrete surfaces requiring maintenance and rehabilitation during its design life cycle. Patch repairs are more often than not done with a specialized polymer-modified mortar which requires adequate quality control and quality assurance during application and curing to ensure long-term success. Unfortunately, there have been many patch repair projects where there has been poor performance of the patch repairs resulting in debonding, cracking and discolouration. In this paper, poor or inadequate quality control during the patch repair process is investigated as one of the possible reasons for poor performance and premature failure . It is postulated that because of the lack of adequate knowledge and understanding of the repair material and the repair process by the various stakeholders (applicator, supplier, consultant and client), deficiencies in the quality control and quality assurance before, during and after the repair project often exists. In many patch repair projects, the responsibility for the successful completion of the patch repair work and the assessment of long term performance of patch repairs is not fully embraced by all of the parties involved.This postulation has led to the research, by using questionnaires designed specifically for the four different stakeholder categories of the concrete repair industry. The results indicate that there is very little discussion amongst the stakeholders regarding quality control and acceptance criteria when performing concrete patch repairs, neither for the identification of patch repair failure directly after the completion of the patch repair, nor for long term performance of the patch repairs.