Organic additives in Mortars: an historical tradition through a critical analysis of recent literature

There has been a long history of applying organic additives (OA) in mortars, and an understanding of both their historical uses and the scientific study on them is fundamental to produce restoration materials which are compatible to historical mortars. In this paper, a critical analysis of literature is given, on both characterization study on historical mortar samples as well as mechanism study on laboratory-made mortar specimens. By doing so, we hope to provide more insight to future work in the field of architectural conservation