71st RILEM Annual Week

The 71st RILEM Annual Week took place in Chennai, India and was organized in conjunction of the "International Conference on Advances in Construction Materials and Systems" on 3-8 September 2017. All those present agreed it was a great week, thanks to the organisers!

Please find below the reports from the different RILEM Standing Committees.

Educational Activites Committee

EAC decided to make the free memberships and future PhD course approvals conditional on submission of the Summary Report by the organizers. Hence EAC will create a PhD Course Summary Report template to make it easier to complete and to get the required information.

The TC Chairs are reminded that student members of TCs could obtain free RILEM memberships by participating in an EAC sponsored PhD course. Student participating in RILEM PhD courses indeed can obtain a 3 years free membership, which then allows them to be full members of RILEM TCs.

Development Activities Committee

As in Sub-Saharan Africa, RILEM offers free membership to select individuals in return for a commitment to engage in specific activities. This action is extended to North Africa & Middle-East and India. We already had many Indian students in Chennai who benefit from this action.

RILEM signed a partnership agreement with ALCONPAT (Latino-American Association of Quality Control, Pathology and Construction Recuperation). Carmen Andrade Perdrix who was RILEM President from 2000 to 2003 became President of Alconpat International on 1 November 2017.  RILEM and Alconpat wish to strengthen their relations for mutual benefit.

Technical Activities Committee 

One new Technical Committee was approved and created: TC CCC - Carbonation of Concrete with Supplementary Cementitious Materials chaired by Nele De Belie. All RILEM members interested to actively contribute to the work of this newly created committee are requested to contact the RILEM secretariat. Any RILEM member may propose the formation of a new technical committee using the required form. 37 Technical Committees are currently active.

It was also agreed that RILEM will start revising its existing recommendations. Topics covered in running TC will be reviewed in the context of this TC. For reviewing topics not covered by ongoing TCs, a special revising committee will be installed. TAC will oversee this continuous process.

Materials and Structures

Three new Associate Editors were proposed by the Editor in Chief and approved by the Board of Editors and Bureau:

• Dimitrios Aggelis (Univ Vrije Brussels, Belgium), who has expertise in non-destructive testing
• Gaurav Sant (UCLA, USA), who is specialized and has expertise in microstructure, new binders, broad expertise in concrete materials science
• Gabriele Tebaldi (Univ Parma, Italy), Gabriele has a profound expertise in bitumen

With respect to the Springer website it is being recalled that supplementary materials, sush as measurement data, pictures, graphs, videos, can be submitted together with a paper. The supplementary materials are stored in Springer’s repository but their copyrights are retained by the authors. The articles can refer to the supplementary materials. The supplementary materials are not reviewed (however, they are available for the reviewers).

An important number of papers per year has been submitted in the new CAP scheme : Vol. 49 (2016) had 381 articles (exceptionally high due to cleaning of the backlog). Vol. 50 (2017) has currently 222 articles and is, since April 2017, working in CAP scheme. The volume will be closed with about 250 articles. Next volumes will have around 150-200 articles.

Identification of the authors in the system (at least the corresponding author) with the ORCID system could improve the credibility/transparency of the authors. It is required by some other publishers already. Springer currently runs a trial with 46 journals. If the results are successful, it will be implemented also in Materials and Structures.

A Special Materials & Structures Issue will be published next year to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the journal RILEM M & S: The list of invited authors will be prepared by the Editor in Chief in communication with the Board of Editors. The articles should give some historic overview as well as new insights into the topic.

RILEM Technical Letters

Two new Associate Editors were proposed by the EiC and approved by the BoE and Bureau:

• Shashank Bishnoi (Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India)
• Kenichiro Nakarai (Gunma University, Japan)