Trade Journals for the Concrete Industry

For decades, the production of cementitious building materials has been geared towards ensuring the product properties of “performance” and “parameter stability”. As a result of the various involved industry branches’ changing requirements concerning energy consumption, the challenges for all parties involved are now on a completely new level. Cement manufacturers must provide solutions based on energy-efficient binder types, the mineral additives mar- ket is inevitably changing towards natural pozzolans, and the number of technical publications on the application of recycled aggregates is increasing. The concrete manufacturing industry, which has to work with these various constituent materials, will have to accept that change is coming. The concrete research community has a certain dis- connect from the economic constraints that concrete manufacturers face in daily practice and therefore claims that the solutions provided by conventional chemical admixtures could ease the problems related to the increasingly complicated requirements posed on the various constituent materials. However, this assumption has so far been regarded as unproven and the European concrete plants should take a closer look, especially in the context of exploding prices in the chemical industry [1, 2], so that they don’t become the sole bearer of the burden related to the geopolitically and economically necessary energy transition later on. The basis for such considerations is provided by technical economic evaluation algorithms for the practical use of construction chemicals. The methodology for this is avail- able – it is simple, reproducible, and practically relevant. This article exemplifies the application of this methodology for comparing the performance of typical superplasticizers currently used in different market segments of the mortar and concrete industry.