Weathering Resilience in Sustainable Plaster Mortar: An Accelerated Aging Study Involving Life-Span Prediction

Assessing a building’s useful life is crucial for protecting the system from various degradation-causing factors. Moreover, evaluating service life significantly relates to its repair, maintenance, and life-cycle impacts and emissions. This study examines the performance of conventional cement–sand (GP0) and 20% granite cutting waste (GCW)-incorporated alternative mortar (GP20) under accelerated conditioning. The selected mortar specimens were subjected to an accelerated aging environment, simulating natural degradation conditioning. To correlate the experimental findings with naturally aged samples, the same experiment, the adhesive strength test, was performed on various field mortar samples that had been exposed to natural aging. The collected service life data were analyzed using the Weibull distribution method to ensure the consistency and validity of the data. In addition, the laboratory-based experimental results and field sample data were correlated based on adhesive strength criteria to predict the service life. The findings from the experimental and field data indicate that the adhesive strength reduction with time follows a nonlinear variation. For experimental samples, with the increase of the exposure cycle, the adhesive strength decreases. Similarly, for field samples, increased age resulted in lower adhesive strength. The adhesive strength relationship studied under accelerated conditioning indicated that the GP0 and GP20 specimens’ mortar–substrate adhesive interface debonded after 156 and 168 acceleration cycles, respectively. The nature of failure was observed as brittle. The end of service is considered at a specified critical value of adhesive strength as 0.3 MPa. Further, alternative mortar (GP20) developed from GCW has undergone a higher number of exposure cycles, which indicates a comparative better resilience against the degradation-causing factors.