The effect of temperature on bacterial self-healing processes in building materials

Abstract

This paper is focused on the bacterial induced calcitation for the crack healing. The bacteria applied for this purpose are from group which is adapted for growth in the high pH environment as a concrete in hydration phase and their metabolic activity leads to create of calcite. In this study, three different bacteria strains (Sporosarcina pasteurii, Bacillus cohnii, Bacillus pseudofirmus) were applied and the influence of various temperatures on their microbial properties was investigated. Our previous experiment indicated that one of the applied bacterial strain in spores form (Bacillus pseudofirmus) are able to survive the temperatures in the range from −20 °C to 140 °C. The xperiment described in this paper extends the previous study and determines the effect of different temperatures on the change in growth activity. In this experiment, bacterial activity was determined based on the change of absorbance in 640 nm by spectrophotometric measurements. The experiment was performed at optimal temperature (30 °C) and lower temperature (10 °C) and it used suitable broth for calcitation. The results showed that the beginning of metabolic activity was shifted by 40 to 50 hours. Only Bacillus cohnii showed different results because its metabolic activity was nearly zero at 10 °C.