Concrete durability issues due to temperature effects and aviation oil spillage at military airbase – A comprehensive review

Military airbase pavement concrete, especially parking aprons, are regularly exposed to extremely severe circumstances that are not usually experienced by other concrete pavements. Aprons are regularly exposed to hydrocarbons (engine oil, hydraulic fluid, and jet oil), extreme heat shocks, and varied lengths of repetitive cyclic heat loading. As a result, the rapid development of scaling, damage to the pavement in the form of thin flat planar pieces that either flake or peel away from the wearing surface of the concrete pavement, is a regular occurrence on these airbases. This scaling can generate significant amounts of foreign object debris (FOD) in the form of released aggregate and poses a grave threat to the safety of both personnel and assets. Considering this, the paper presents a comprehensive review of the existing literature investigating this serious issue raised by the Australian Air Force. In this review, the real environment and boundary conditions that these airfields are subjected to, which causes rapid scaling, are identified. Furthermore, the actual degrading mechanism including the damaging compounds likely to present in the engine oil, hydraulic fluid and jet oil and their chemical reactions to Portland cement concrete (PCC) are presented. The study also discusses the influence of strength of concrete, moisture content, water-cement ratio (w/c) and the permeability of concrete on the durability of the military airbase concrete. Finally, the authors recommend possible binders, aggregates, and additive materials that could be suitably used in the military airbase concrete to mitigate the addressed issues.