There are plenty of stone materials including bricks and pavings which feel great to touch under foot or hand.
This paper focuses on the creation of a Centre for the recycling of stone materials.
Analyses of stone materials can give us an idea of the kind of food they were processing, and bones can tell us something about diets and diseases.
Hence, wear resistance characterization of stone materials is an important issue in civil engineering projects for appropriate selection and design of floor coverings.
The non-invasive ultrasound propagation technique was applied in laboratory tests with the purpose to evaluate the susceptibility to decay of stone materials.
Most of the foundations, floor areas, pillars, and entrance units of the ancient constructions consist of stone materials, evidencing that stones were the principal building material in the ancient Kingdom of Anuradhapura.
To this purpose, different methods and probes were comparatively used to infer, noninvasively, the relationship between the water content of stone materials and the reflection properties at microwave frequency of the material.
In the light of these results, EN 14231 was concluded to have been unsatisfying in terms of the characteristics expected from a standard and its applicability for slip resistance tests of stone materials to be used in floorings.
Taking into account guidelines given by some European Institutions involved on conservation of stone materials (see Additional file 1: Table S3), IC analyses (Figure 6) point out a moderate sulphate contamination in the four outermost layers of the plaster with a maximum in the second one.
These were investigated with MANOVA, revealing significant differences in psychoacoustic, physical, and perceptual features between categories among the surveyed restaurants: for example, that restaurants serving Chinese food had the highest prevalence of stone materials, and that Western-menu places were the least loud.
