Microstructure related durability of cementitious composites

The value of the, infrastructure, worldwide, has been estimated at over 40 trillion US dollars. That is about five times the value of all the gold hat has even been mined! There is a big difference, however, between infrastructure assets and gold. With elapse of time gold will remain gold. Our infrastructure, however, suffers from ageing. With an average service life of about 100 years, our infrastructure would ‘evaporate’ within one century. Given the enormous amount of money represented by our infrastructure and the huge amounts of raw materials and energy that have been used to realize all these buildings, a huge responsibility comes to us to maintain, preserve, upgrade, rehabilitate or renew this infrastructure. On top of all this we have to satisfy the demand from rapidly developing economies for growth of their infrastructure. This further increases the responsibility of all stakeholders active in the building industry, from layman to decision makers, to ensure the best possible performance of our structures at minimal costs for construction, operation and maintenance and this at the lowest possible ecological footprint. Scientists and technologists cannot ignore these developments and changing boundary conditions. On the contrary, they constitute new challenges for improvement of existing materials and creating new robust and environment friendly materials. Rapid depletion of resources and strong reductions in energy consumption force scientist to search for ‘getting more from less’ and this, if possible, not after hundred years but tomorrow! Challenging goals like these require in-depth knowledge of the materials. This 3rd Microdurability conference wants to contribute to deeper understanding of the behaviour of existing and new cement-based building materials exposed to a wide variety of exposure conditions. More than hundred papers will be presented during the conference and will increase our knowledge of the complex world of cement-based systems. Microdurability’2016 is a Sino-Dutch initiative, organized under the umbrella of RILEM and also supported by ACI, fib and several universities and research institutes in China and The Netherlands. Since the conference takes place in China, it is clear that most of the work for organizing this event was carried by staff members of the organizing Southeast University and Jiangsu Research Institute of Building Science. The Organizing Committee would like to thank the Chinese team for their outstanding preparations.