The History Of Concrete

Concrete is an extraordinary and key structural material in the human history. As written by Brunauer and Copeland (1964), “Man consumes no material except water in such tremendous quantities”. It is no doubt that with the development of human civilization, concrete will continue to be a dominant construction material in the future. However, the development of modern concrete industry also introduces many environmental problems such as pollution, waste dumping, emission of dangerous gases, depletion of naturalresources etc.

Presently Portland cement and supplementary cementitious materials are cheapest binders which maintain/ enhance the performance of concrete. However, out of these binders, production of Portland cement is very energy exhaustive

These materials present some unique desirable properties which cannot be met by using OPC only (Neville, 1995a). For producing high performance concrete (HPC), it is well recognized that the use of supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), such as silica fume (SF), ground granulated glass blast-furnace slag (GGBS) and fly ash (FA) are necessary. The concept of HPC has definitely evolved with time. Initially it was equated to high strength concrete (HSC), which certainly has some merit, but it does not show a complete and true picture. There is a need to consider other properties of the concrete as well which sometimes, may even take priority over the strength criterion. Various authors proposed different definitions for HPC. According to Forster (1994), “High Performance Concrete is a concrete: made with appropriate materials, combined according to a selected mix design; properly mixed, transported, placed, consolidated and cured so that the resulting concrete will give an excellent performance in the structure in which it is placed, in the environment to which it is exposed and with the loads to which it will be subjected for its design”. Thus, HPC is directly related to durable