Effects to lime mortars mechanical properties by pozzolans

Being a cradle in its past to many civilizations, Anatolia nests to many remnants of these civilizations either underground or on the surface, many of which are still in the service of public. Therefore it is the most reputable obligation of all mankind to put their utmost effort to preserve these structures and relay to the next generations as the most valuable heritage left by our ancestors. Because of hosting a vast heritage of many different civilizations, particularly from Byzantine and Ottoman times, and also with her paramount natural beauties, Istanbul has already deserved to be the World?s Cultural Capital for the year of 2010. Obviously this situation has increased the importance of enhanced efforts to be put in, in preserving this heritage to their originals. Any effort spent in to this purpose will surely produce concrete results. For the renovative works of historical structures, it is obvious that the preparation of prescriptions to produce compatible to genuine mortar mixtures with enhanced strength and durability is of utmost importance for the purpose. Because of the low strength of lime mixture mortars alone used in historical buildings reaching to our times and their poor durability features to environmental attacks like water, finely powdered natural pozzolana has been used in the mortar mixtures of Southern European and calcined clay, finely crushed red brick and its powder has been used in the mortars of Byzantine and Ottoman times structures. In this workshop pozzolana featured industrial residuals like silica fume, fly ash and blast furnace slag have had been used. Four different mortar mixtures have been prepared with 30 percent addition of these pozzolana materials proportinated to the lime in weight. Silica based standard sand had been used and fine crushed red brick and its powder were exempted. Compressive and flexural tests had been carried out on four differently prescribed group of samples at 7, 28 and 365 days intervals. Scope of this study was limited to the flexural and compressive strength tests leaving the durability concerns out of the scope. Keywords: Mortar, fly ash, silica fume, blast furnace slag