Natural and Artificial Building Stones: Insights from Petrophysical Properties and Consolidation Procedures

Dear Colleagues，

The great variety of types of natural stone and their availability have favored their wide use both in monuments and in historical and new buildings. However, each variety has characteristic properties, such as its mineralogy, texture, or structures, that ultimately determine their qualities or funtionalities as construction materials. On the other hand, artificial stones are becoming more frequent because they can be lighter or cheaper than natural stone, as well as having specific characteristics on demand. For these reasons, it is important to know their behavior and durability, since these materials could also be a good replacement option in actions to conserve the built cultural heritage, in addition to its use in modern construction. Furthermore, climate change as well as all bioenvironmental and anthropic agents are intensifying the deterioration of these construction materials. For these reasons, additional experimental setups are being carried out under atmospheric conditions to evaluate these materials under real conditions and compare with laboratory approachs. In the same way, the development of new consolidating products has grown exponentially in the last two decades.  Despite this, the behavior of these products, which can be affected by the affinity with the mineral substrate, or even the most suitable method and conditions for applying consolidants, is still open to debate, and new studies must be performed to improve the knowledge.

This Issue welcomes contributions both on the characterization of building stones by classic approaches in the laboratory and in the field, including novel insights through new techniques, as well as innovative products and procedures for the consolidation, e.g., green products to improve the eco-friendly conservation, in order to contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms and conditions that limit the durability of any building stones.

Dr. Eduardo Molina
Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Cultrone
Prof. Dr. Salvador Domínguez
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Minerals is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.