Bio-based self-healing concrete: A review

Abstract

Concrete is one of the most used materials in the world and it could be expected its production will continue to rise in the future. In addition to many advantages of this material, not only the production, transportation and building, but also the subsequent care of concrete constructions is huge economic and ecological burden. Durability of concrete structures is largely affected by the formation of cracks. Manual remediation of the cracks is not only economically demanding, but also time consuming and laborious. In recent years, self-healing concrete based on the spontaneous crack-sealing with microbial produced minerals was suggested and investigated by many researchers. This paper is a review of the already performed studies dealing with the topic of the biological self-healing concrete and it outlines our plan for future research in this area.