Civil Engineering Association

This report contains papers presented at a Research Seminar , or rather "workshop", organised by our Department. It is the third in a series. The previous seminars were held in 1993 and 19961• The seminar is "Nordic", by which is meant that the speakers came from the Scandinavian countries -Demnark, Norway, Sweden- and Finland. Certainly there are other Nordic countries in which frost is a real problem, but this time there were no participants from these countries. Most participants were invited personally and asked to give presentations. The seminar language was English making it possible also for participants from outside Scandinavia to take part. This time same German guest research students took part as "observers" and as contributors to the discussions.
The papers cover many aspects of frost damage. Some papers discuss the very important problem of mai sture uptake before and during a freeze/tha w test. Other papers treat the destruction mechanisms behind salt-frost scaling and internai frost attack. There are also papers dealing with the assessment of the service life of concrete exposed to frost action. Same papers present data from field exposure of specimens and from real structures. Altogether, the seminar gives a good picture of what is going on in frost research in the Nordic countries. Almost aU papers, however, treat concrete. There are many more building materials for which frost damage is a problem, but no papers were presented. This does not necessarily mean that work is not done on materials such as clay brick, natural stone, etc, but evidently the activities are much smaller than for concrete. One reason might be that it is much more difficult to find research funding for studies of these types of materials.