What Are The Factors That Affect The Properties Of Natural Stones?

Natural stones are widely used in all areas of our lives and it can be considered the most important building material throughout the history of architecture and civil works. However, although the stone is always perceived as an “eternal” material, it is well known that building stone undergoes many processes of deterioration so exact properties of the natural stones must be known. It is important to predict the behavior of natural stones, which are located around high temperature and heat sources, against the temperature to take necessary security measures with estimating the damage. Marble, travertine and concrete are materials that are constantly used in building, either for structural or decorative purposes, but they are susceptible to alteration by natural atmospheric agents or others resulting from urban and industrial activity.
The Azarshahr's marble and Hajiabadd’s travertine, studied in this paper, has been widely used
These temperature gradients act by amplifying the differential dilation effects by different coefficients of expansion (Jansen et al., 1993).

Temperature variations are one of the major factors influencing the intrinsic properties of rocks )Guide3-10,11). It has been shown that the variation of expansion increases with temperature )3), which is primarily responsible for the changes in the microstructure of rocks, inducing new fractures and microfractures.
In this contribution samples were investigated to elucidate correlations between rock tensile properties and sample size with thermal treatments at different temperatures as an attempt to simulate temperature changes. For this purpose direct tensile strength have been performed for 60 rock samples following standard procedures before and after heating at different temperatures and cooling under air-cooled