Global Climatic Change (GCC) is changing the way we manage and maintain our concrete infrastructure. For the last 15 years CONSEC conferences have strived to bring experts on a common platform to discuss and disseminate international expertise with respect to performance of concrete under severe conditions. These conferences have closely followed the evolution of research in this area and have brought forward critical advances that are now been adopted worldwide. CONSECβ10 paid particular attention to new trends. Not only traditional themes, such as performance under severe environments and loading, concrete construction, codes and design, and maintenance and repairs, are included. Attention is also given to sustainability, high performance specialized materials, new NDT methods, and emerging fields such as structural health monitoring and sensing.
The contributions in Concrete Under Severe Conditions show a clear accent on developing new technologies to reverse the trend in our decaying concrete infrastructure in both developed and emerging economies. This requirement has to be balanced with our need for sustainability, ecological preservation and environmental protection through the use of recycled materials and industrial by-products. Concrete Under Severe Conditions demonstrates the need for a continued dialogue and active cooperation between both developed and emerging economies to fully understand and deal with extreme environmental and loading issues on concrete infrastructure, and will be of interest to academics, engineers and professionals involved in concrete and concrete infrastructure.