Modern construction is unthinkable without concrete, the global production and consumption of which is about 10 billion m3 per year. Humanity is entering a new paradigm. Existing approaches to ensuring the sustainable development of the structural concrete construction are clearly insufficient. Intensive innovative work is currently going on to create new concretes with various functional requirements and new technologies to reduce the construction cycle and save labor, increase durability, improve the efficiency of structures, ensure environmental friendliness and sustainable development. Self-regulating concretes are one of the most in-demand subjects of modern concrete science today. Today, we already can state the successful implementation of a number of such concretes. First of all, these are self-compacting concretes, self-healing (self-repairing) concretes, self-stressed concretes and concretes with compensated shrinkage, self-cleaning concretes, self-sensing concretes and structures, as well as superplastic concretes reinforced with short fiber which are self-strengthened under tensile load and whose ultimate strain exceeds that of conventional concretes by 300 times. Additive technologies, including 3D printing, production of photochromic and transparent concretes, are becoming increasingly important. All described types of self-regulating concretes most fully embody the latest advances in concrete technology and open up new paths for the development of concrete science as a fundamental section of materials science.
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