Beating Concrete Creep

From Concrete Construction magazine: MIT Slows Concrete Creep to a Crawl

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) online Early Edition the week of June 15, researchers say that concrete creep (the technical term for the time-dependent deformation that occurs in concrete when it is subjected to load) is caused by the rearrangement of particles at the nano-scale.

Two thoughts. First, I suspect the author gets a little overexcited about the potential of this discovery, but that does not diminish the impact of gaining such insight. Increasing the durability of concrete is a major environmental, economic, and architectural benefit.

Second, look at the end of the article:

"This work was funded in part by the Lafarge Group, a French building materials producer."

Good example of the marketing value of sponsoring research.