The buildings built by the ancient Romans are still standing today as a tribute to the brilliance of their engineers and architects, but how they managed to do so remained a mystery. They have endured millennia, the fall of an empire, battles, and are a testament to their ingenuity.
The solution has been discovered, though, and it lies in the material used to build these magnificent buildings, according to research that was published on Friday, January 6 in the journal Science Advances.
Researchers from Switzerland, Italy, and the United States were part of the team who discovered that concrete’s ability to ‘self-heal’ may be the reason why concrete is made to be durable.
Take Pantheon for example, which nearly 2,000 years later, still stands as the world’s largest dome of unreinforced concrete, which ‘would not have existed without the concrete as it was in the Roman time’, said Admir Masic, lead author of the paper and an Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor of civil and environmental engineering.
The researchers analysed 2,000-year-old concrete samples collected from a wall at the archaeological site of Privernum, Italy, the structure which is said to have a similar composition to that of concrete found through the Roman Empire and found pozzolanic concrete.
It is a durable building material which contributes to the strength of Roman architecture and the main ingredient of which is named after the Italian city of Pozzuoli, on the Bay of Naples.
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