Abstract

The technical infrastructure plays a decisive role in the economic and societal development. Maintaining its functionality is thus a major challenge for the future and therefore represents a market segment of the construction industry with a high growth potential. This certainly holds true for water supply infrastructure. The main objective is to extend the service life of the structures by preventing damages. There are many reasons for a continuously growing number of material failures occurring before the planned service life is achieved. In this regard, factors such as inadequate building material quality, shortcomings in planning and execution, as well as stress caused by changing environmental and operational loads have to be addressed. Furthermore, it is already clear that megatrends such as climate change, resource scarcity or globalization will significantly change the development, maintenance and repair of the entire technical infrastructure and thus also the area of water supply. As a result, the stakeholders along the value chain will have to continuously face new challenges. The development of prevention concepts plays an outstanding role here. This applies, for example, to cement-based materials used as coatings in water reservoirs, whose performance plays an outstanding role for a hygienically water supply, but also for the protection for entire structures. Obviously, new developments in the field of materials technology appear necessary here at first, in order to promote the resilience of the components and thus lead to an increase of the durability of the infrastructure structures. However, for a sustainable life cycle management, integrative concepts must be found that address the various segments of a building's life cycle. For instance, reliable condition analyses of existing structures and the development of robust quality control concepts are just as important for reducing life cycle costs in drinking water supply as innovations in materials technology.