Description
This presentation was given as part of the special Materials in Society session "Materials for Infrastructure: Building Bridges in the Global Community," held on Wednesday, March 12 at the TMS 2008 Annual Meeting & Exhibition in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The following is the abstract of the presentation:

Recent natural (e.g., hurricanes Katrina and Rita) and anthromorphic (e.g., the World Trade Centers and Boston's Big Dig) disasters have highlighted the important roles that construction materials play in catastrophic events. Construction materials also are playing an important role in the nation's aging and overburdened infrastructure. For example, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), in their 2005 Infrastructure Report Card, projects that the cost of repairing the nation's infrastructure back to good condition has escalated to over $1.6 trillion dollars. To meet these challenges, advanced construction materials are needed. These construction materials will not only be expected to have improved initial and long-term performance properties (i.e., have longer service lives and longer mean times between repairs), but also, in many applications, will be expected to perform simultaneously multiple functions, e.g., enhancing the appearance of a structure while acting as a biocidal surface. In this presentation, field-observed construction material failures will be shown, and recent advances in the performance of construction materials will be documented.

The recording is made possible through support from AIME.

TMS is interested in your thoughts regarding these webcast products. Please e-mail questions or comments to tdunlap@tms.org.