Construct background and tasks 

The climate in Guangdong is a typical subtropics high temperature and high humidity, on the other hand, Guangdong has a long coastline and the majority of the economically developed areas are locatedin the coastal areas. As the country’s leading economic province, the construction of large-scale infrastructure has laid an indispensable foundation for its development. With the further development of the national economy, social problems such as lack of resources and deterioration of the ecological environment have become the biggest obstacle to its sustainable development. Based on this situation, the key laboratories proposed the following tasks：

1) Based on the climate and environmental characteristics of Guangdong provinces, and combined with various changelings such as the lack of resources and the deterioration of the ecological environment, the laboratory will put numerous effort to the research of deterioration mechanism of civil engineering structures in coastal environments, and use new materials, new technologies and new methods to ensure the civil engineering structure durability and sustainability;
2) Deepen and expand the application of basic research and achievements transformation, combined with the needs of national economy construction in Guangdong Province, cooperate with the industrial technology upgrades, provide technical services for the development of the construction industry, and cultivate excellent scientific researcher and engineering practice talents;
3) Grasp international developments trends, strengthen international cooperation in talents exchange and scientific research, enhance scientific research ability and research developing level, improve scientific research environment and experimental conditions, make the key laboratories as a high-level consequential scientific experiment research foundation and engineering application platform in the field of durability research area.

Development strategy

1) Theoretical guiding ideology

The theoretical guiding ideology of the key laboratory is derived from the international advanced “Performance and Reliability based Service Life Design (PRSLD)” framework. In this guiding ideology, the whole life process of civil engineering structure is divided into four stages, i.e. project establishment, design, construction and use. With the main purpose of ensuring the safety and usability of the structure, relying on the limit state of two random variables composed of external effect (S) and structural resistance (R), the design and redesign of the structural service life are carried out around the center of structural performance at each stage of the whole life cycle of the structure. New materials, service life design theory and non-destructive testing technology are the three foundations; specifications and databases are suspension supports.

2) Definition of civil engineering durability

The durability of civil engineering structures is not only to ensure the safety and usability of the structure during its service life, but also to take into account the requirements of resources, energy consumption and emissions (sustainable design).

3) Sustainable design of civil engineering structure

Interchange the acting rock and resistance rock in the traditional structural design, let the civil engineering structure becomes the acting rock (considering resources, energy consumption and emissions), and the surrounding environment becomes the resistance rock (geological circle and ecological circle), which constitutes the subject of sustainable design of civil engineering structure sustainable.

4)Taking social needs as the driving force for research and application

Based on the hotspot of social needs, the Key Laboratory adopts an operation mode that combines basic research (National) and engineering application (industrial) to provide technical service-s to ensure the durability of various civil engineering structures.

5) 4M concepts of research and application

Key laboratories start with the application of engineering structures as a starting point (with multi-functional applications), multi-scale problems from structure (macroscopically) to materials (micro), and disciplines involved more extensively (multidisciplinary), while durability itself Considering the multidimensional problem of time dimension on the basis of geometric three-dimensional space.