Jonas Naujokat
Jonas Naujokat
Name: Jonas Naujokat
Title of the project: Durability of Airport Concrete under Frost, De-icing Salts, and Impact Loading
Project description
Background
Achieving durable concrete under harsh climatic conditions remains one of the key challenges in structural engineering, particularly in cold regions such as Norway, where freeze-thaw cycles and de-icing salts impose severe stresses on the material. Durable concrete is especially important for infrastructure such as roads, bridges, airfields, offshore installations, and hydropower dams. While reinforcement corrosion is the leading degradation mechanism in structural concrete, salt-frost scaling, internal frost damage, and liquid uptake represent significant challenges to durability. Conventional air-entrainment methods for producing durable concrete often fail to generate a well-defined air-void system and tend to cause undesirable reductions in strength.
Project Objectives
The overall goal of this project is to investigate and develop new methods for producing durable, low-carbon concrete resistant to combined salt-frost and impact exposure. To achieve this goal, the following objectives will be undertaken:
- To develop a fundamental understanding of the microstructural and macroscopic behavior of innovative solid air-void solutions in standard and low-carbon concrete, compared with conventional air-entraining admixtures (AEAs), across both fresh and hardened states.
- To determine the effect of these innovative solid-air void solutions on hardened concrete material properties.
- To evaluate the protective effect of these innovative solid air-void solutions against freeze-thaw and salt-frost exposure.
- To investigate the relationship between accelerated salt-frost testing and real exposure.
- To investigate the scalability and real-world applicability of these solutions across low-carbon concrete mix designs and casting technologies for frost-exposed concrete pavements.To characterize and model the combined effects of frost and impact loading on concrete with innovative void systems through field and laboratory investigations.
Methods
Laboratory investigations include material characterization, studies of fresh, young, and hardened concrete (including hydration), determination of the size distribution of air/macropores, capillary pores, and gel pores using CT scanning, sorption measurements and characterization of the moisture state, modelling of freezable water, frost exposure testing, and mechanical characterization including strength, DIC, dynamic loading (gas gun, shock tube, or similar).
Research goals
The long-term vision is to develop and investigate a reliable, industrially applicable method for producing frost-resistant, low-carbon concrete without the variability and uncertainty (in volume and spacing of air voids) of traditional air-entrainment methods. Such advancements directly support the goal of climate-neutral infrastructure while significantly extending the service life of critical structures, including hydropower dams, offshore installations, bridges, and airfields exposed to harsh frost and de-icing conditions.
Supervision
Collaboration and Funding
The project is in collaboration with Forsvarsbygg (Norwegian Defence Estates Agency: https://www.forsvarsbygg.no/en/om-oss)
Date of start of Phd: July 2026