International Concrete Abstracts Portal

There is a lack of comprehensive guidelines for the use of fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) dowels in concrete pavement construction. In light of this, NEx: An ACI Center of Excellence for Nonmetallic Building Materials has announced a newly published document SG23.03 (25): NEx Guideline: FRP Dowels in Concrete Pavements.

NEU: An ACI Center of Excellence for Carbon Neutral Concrete remains dedicated to supporting the built environment by maximizing resource efficiency and promoting the adoption of cutting-edge materials and intelligent engineering solutions. NEU amplifies efforts to disseminate knowledge on lowering the carbon footprint of concrete construction and advancing next-generation technologies.

Hosted by the Concrete Innovation Council (CIC), the session “Innovations in Concrete” will be held on March 30, 2025, at the ACI Concrete Convention – Spring 2025 in Toronto, ON, Canada. The theme is “Implementing Low Carbon Concrete – From Innovation to Reality.” Later this year, the ACI Foundation 2025 Concrete Innovation Forum will be held August 12-14, 2025, at the Hotel Clio, Denver, CO, USA. The focus will be on how new practices, materials, or inventions move from the lab to the field.

The concrete industry is at a turning point, with a growing focus on sustainability reshaping how cement and concrete are designed, produced, and implemented. To remain relevant in today’s market, all industry stakeholders must stay informed about evolving practices and new materials that can support sustainable construction.

Reinforced concrete sections have typically been the most used material for hardened protective construction due to their mass and the ductility provided by the reinforcement. The additional mass of these sections reduces deflections and increases dampening, which reduces vibrations. Even for the occasional occurrence of hardened steel structures, the foundation is comprised of reinforced concrete. Reinforced concrete structures are hardened for a multitude of reasons. The most common include antiterrorism, force protection, equivalent protection for quantity distance arc violations, personnel protection, prevention of prompt propagation, asset protection, and elastic response during repeated intentional detonations. Many of the structures in the United States (US) used by the Department of Defense (DoD), to accommodate a rapid increase in production and storage of explosives were built during World War II (1941-1945). Facilities used for explosives production, maintenance, research and development (R&D), demolition, testing, and training are commonly referred to as Explosives Operating Locations (EOLs). This puts the average age of many of these facilities close to 80 years-old, which is past their originally intended service life. This paper presents a structural health and visual inspection (SHVI) technique developed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Facilities Explosives Safety Mandatory Center of Expertise (FES MCX), the University of Oklahoma, and the Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC) Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory (GSL) for the inspection of reinforced concrete Explosives Operations Location (EOL) facilities and live-fire training facilities [9]. This inspection process has been utilized to inspect over 1500 structures across multiple countries over the last decade and aid DoD installations in planning and budgeting for necessary repairs and future recapitalization priorities. This work does not include application to anti-terrorism or force protection in hardened structures for conventional weapon effects. This process has also been modified for use in live-fire training operations in concrete facilities and coupled with analyses to determine facility adequacy for explosives operations with desired charge weights, based on the given facility’s current structural health rating and its analyzed ability to remain elastic during repeated intentional detonations. The FES MCX partners with ERDC for concrete coring, materials analysis, and testing of samples to determine the estimated remaining service life of concrete structures based on the carbonation front of cored samples determined by the carbonation tests in relationship to the steel reinforcement. Examples of historical application will be given, and details provided on how these methods can lead to improved life-cycle cost for concrete structures and paired with design development criteria for optimal results.