Enhancing bonding of fresh concrete to steel through Laser Surface Texturing

In this work, we investigated the adhesion between surface-treated stainless-steel samples and a standard cement mixture. Laser surface treatments such as Direct Laser Writing (DLW) and Laser-Induced Periodic Surface Structures (LIPSS) were employed, which resulted effective to reach up to 16-fold increase of adhesion compared to the untextured. A comparison with mechanical surface treatments, i.e., sandblasting, revealed that, although an increase of adhesion was achieved probably ascribable to the higher surface roughness, such improvement in terms of bonding strength was significantly lower than the one obtained with the laser surface texturing.