Evolution of concrete industry, technology and science 1999-2008

Concrete industry has developed considerably in the last ten years. Building-, trade-and infrastructure construction have provided continuous activity for enterprises and private businesses in the concrete industry. Nowadays, the precast concrete and the ready mixed concrete companies -partly with foreign capital investments -possess the manufacturing technologies of international standard. Cement industry was one of the leaders in the domestic acceptance efforts of European Standards, which activity considerably helped the development of the concrete technology as well. Following the acceptance of EN 197-1: 2000, new types of cements appeared which can help to meet special requirements due to their advantageous performance. In Hungary, it is almost common to use five-component concrete mixes (i.e. cement, water, aggregate, admixture, additive) instead of the conventional three-component one (i.e. cement, water, aggregate). In the last ten years extensive research and development efforts were carried out in the fields of concrete paving stones, precast pretensioned floors, precast panel walls, precast spin concrete piles and precast concrete elements for road and bridge construction. The ready mixed concrete industry has been developed continuously with increasing amounts of production. Several new concrete plant has been opened, machine stocks was renewed in the older plants. The basis for the quality concrete production of high performance ready mix concretes has become available in Hungary. Concrete road pavement construction has turned into its new era with the recent construction of 50 km concrete pavement on the motorways M0 and M6 (in Hungary, no concrete roads were built since 1975). Due to the considerable scientific research efforts and laboratory developments, special construction materials appeared in the Hungarian concrete industry (fibre reinforced concretes, self compacting concretes, fibre reinforced polymer materials for concrete, high strength and ultra high strength concretes, aerated foam concretes and foam cements, recycled aggregates, foamed glass lightweight aggregates, etc.).