Innovation in concrete research—review and perspective

The heritage of concrete making as a craft has made testing of laboratory specimens the basic principle for research and standard control systems; this has corresponded well with the conditions for field concrete technology and structural performance throughout the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries’ developments. New demands for concrete in the wake of World War II made tremendous development possible for the cement and concrete industries. However, deleterious reactions in field concrete appeared in many countries over the next decades, among other reasons because the laboratory testing systems were preserved without recognition that rates and intensity of the reactions in the actual concrete caused changes of the processes, which did not occur in the test samples. That made the reproducibility of the tests incompatible with the sought predictability for the properties of the concrete.