Development of a leaching protocol for concrete

Based on two pre-validation studies and a final validation study, a short-time characterisation test for the determination of the leaching behaviour of concrete has been developed. The test protocol includes a diffusion test and an availability test. Generally, the emissions from the concrete specimen investigated were very low and often close to or well below the detection limits. Therefore, the development of a short-time characterisation test proved to be difficult. From the leaching results it could be deduced, that the leaching from concrete is in principle diffusion controlled. The results from both the tank leaching test and the availability tests indicated that the precision in terms of repeatability of the tests is good and the reproducibility is acceptable.