C-Probe Systems help to restore Grade II Listed building

C-Probe Systems help to restore Grade II Listed building

C-Probe provided expert corrosion prevention knowledge and specialist materials to restore and preserve a Grade II listed building that had been lying vacant and derelict for many years.

The project took place in 2015 at Terry’s Chocolate Factory in York, UK which was facing severe structural degradation due to the ingress of moisture and water over its near 100-year life.

Using cathodic protection technology to control and prevent future corrosion, the space was successfully regenerated into prestige apartments, increasing the service life to another 100+ years and significantly higher value.

Over time, and as moisture and water leak into the fabric of buildings, any protective coatings used during construction breakdown and protection is lost. Over the ensuing decades corrosion will propagate and, where the masonry is in intimate contact with the steel or infill mason’s mortar, cause the rust packed layers (or exfoliation corrosion) to result in the tensile forces cracking and moving the brick skin.

The problem will perpetuate until failure of the façade as cracks allow more moisture and oxygen to react to form more corrosion forces. These corrosion products are 8-10x the volume of original steel and hence will result in damage forming.

To tackle this problem effectively, impressed current cathodic protection (ICCP) was used as a method to control corrosion whilst the cracking and movement were repaired. ICCP is a technique used to control the corrosion of a metal surface (steel) by making it a cathode of an electrochemical cell, which is done by passing a current through via anodes that are inert in themselves but allow protection current to flow.

C-Probe’s low carbon innovation, LoCem® +point® is manufactured from industrial waste by-products and repurposed as an anode mortar which allows installation within the bed joints in order to pass current through the brick infill to protect the steel.

• The project would have complied with the recent Government policy of Environmental Social Governance (ESG), which all public procurement projects need to take into consideration from January 2021. This forward-thinking approach helped cut CO2 emissions in the project by a factor of 6.4 or 80%.

The implementation of an ICCP system provided a range of long-term benefits and a successful restoration project:

• Asset owners have full transparency of corrosion data with AiMS, meaning they can make informed maintenance decisions, reducing cost and social disruption.
• Sustainable and ESG compliant – embodied carbon of the building would have been retained and the materials used (LoCem) would have reduced CO2e of the mortar by 80%.
• Technically and financially preserving value of the asset.

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