Widespread or in Large Area

Visualisation of the malfunction

Detachments of the ceramic tiling in large areas, coinciding with stretches of tiling sometimes constrained by abutting construction elements or carpentry but, in other cases, the detachment is not related to the location.

In a certain way, it may be said that debonding occurs where the stresses are critical for the adhesion or where adhesion is weaker than the stresses.

Detachment is also frequently accompanied by buckling without tiles falling off. Here, burst or cracked joints may be observed and, in the case of exterior tilings, mortar stains caused by water circulation behind the wall tiling.

Tapping will provide an irregular drummy or hollow sound, more hollow in the proximities of the detachments, and buckling. The tiles can be extracted with hardly any effort. In certain situations, extraction of one tile will draw along adjacent tiles.

Inspection of the back of the detached or extracted tile displays the features already described in the section on isolated detachments, fundamentally: tile back free of bonding material, debonding with adhered bonding material, and debonding that pulls away fixing surface with the bonding material.

The tile back furnishes much information for the determination of the causes of widespread detachment. However, a clean back does not just indicate mutual incompatibility of the bonding material with the tile or widespread adhesion failure. The adhesion may be normal or even optimum under stable conditions, but may fail in the tile/bonding material interface with shear stresses.

The bonding material on the wall or the fixing surface material itself provides more accurate information on the conditions under which the tile installation has been performed or on the state of the bonding material/fixing surface interface

It is also necessary to analyse the wall tiling as a whole, establishing whether there is any relationship between the location of the detachments and any relations that might generate stresses (changes of plane, abutments, correspondence with openings, edges of the deck, etc.). In addition, it is necessary to examine:

• Whether the wall tiling has been installed with an open joint and what the state of those joints is
• If there are perimeter movement joints, how they have been arranged, and what their state is
• The type of material, its cohesion and appearance when the fixing surface is viewed
• In interiors, the deck span (distance between columns) and the location of the partition walls. Also, the presence of cracks at the meetings with partitions and at the corners of openings
• In all situations, the presence of damp, efflorescences between joints, changes in colour of the grouting, salts on the fixing surface, etc.

• Assignment of the malfunction
  

• Prevention of the malfunction
  

• Historical