Water flow in cracks is important for long-term durability of concrete structures. Forcement-based materials, water flow behaviour in cracks involves fluid dynamics, masstransfer process between flowing water and fractured surface. This paper reports recentexperimental results on water flow rate in single crack of mortar specimens. A permeationdevice is conceived especially to study water flow in narrow cracks. Different crack openingapertures are obtained by adjusting the fractured surfaces and the roughness of fracturedsurface is characterized by surface topography scanned by laser profilomcter. The rate ofwater flow through crack is measured under a constant pressure at room temperature fordifferent opening apertures and different fractured roughness. On the basis of available results,the influence of surface roughness is found more important at smaller opening cases and theimportant decrease of flow rate with time is attributed to both non steady flow behaviour ofwater and the dissolution-precipitation process between water and fracture surfaces.
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