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Innovative isolation mortar for tiles convinces the professionals
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The Info Box
A brief ABC of mortar, cement & Co.
With its high tech formulation, PCI Nanosilent® is writing a new chapter in the long history of the construction material mortar. This development can be traced back a good 10,000 years, when early craftsmen in what is now Anatolia used mortar with quicklime as a binder to build brick walls. The art of construction with mortar reached its first peak with the Ancient Romans, who produced lime mortar not only to build walls, but also as the precursor of modern concrete, opus caementitium. The construction of the cupola of the Pantheon in Rome with its diameter of 43 meters bears impressive witness to this achievement. Today we have an enormous variety of special mortars for every application - here are some of the main categories:
Mortars consist of a binder (cement, lime or polymers) and aggregates such as sand or clay and, in modern mortars, also polymers, which are stirred with water and harden after application.
Cement is now the most widely used binder for mortar and concrete. It consists of a complex mixture of substances including not only calcium silicate but also certain amounts of aluminium and iron oxide as well as sulfates.
Quicklime in chemical terms is calcium oxide. On contact with water and the carbon dioxide in the air, it gradually hardens into lime crystals.
Concrete is a mortar with admixtures of coarser stone. It is used to build purely concrete structures - often in the form of steel reinforced concrete.
Flexible mortars offer an increased range of adhesiveness and improved flexibility due to the inclusion of suitable special polymers. The composition of polymer enhanced
joint grouts makes them particularly water repellent.
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