PREDICTING THE LONG-TERM PERFORMANCE OF STRUCTURES MADE WITH ADVANCED CEMENT BASED MATERIALS IN EXTREMELY AGGRESSIVE ENVIRONMENTS: CURRENT STATE OF PRACTICE AND RESEARCH NEEDS – THE APPROACH OF H2020 PROJECT RESHEALIENCE.

Recently, in the framework of H2020, the European Commission has funded the project ReSHEALience (www.uhdc.eu), whose main goal is to develop an Ultra High Durability Concrete (UHDC) and a Durability Assessment-based Design (DAD) methodology for structures, to improve durability and predict their long-term performance under Extremely Aggressive Exposures. The project, coordinated by Politecnico di Milano, gathers 14 partners from 8 different countries (Italy, Spain, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Malta), including 6 academic and research institutions together with 8 industrial partners, which cover the whole value chain, from producers of concrete constituents to construction companies to stake-holders and end-users. A key activity of the project will consist in the development of a theoretical model to evaluate ageing and degradation of UHDC structures, extending the modelling to predict the lifespan, and its incorporation in a Durability Assessment-based Design (DAD) methodology, which will be validated against experimental tests performed in the same project and the monitored performance of six full-scale pilots in real exposure conditions. The paper, starting from a review of the current state of art on the modelling of advanced cement based materials in extremely aggressive environments (EAE), will address the approach pursued in the project.