The European project ACES – Assessment of Concrete and Civil Engineering Structures, funded by the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Commission, aimed to improve our understanding of how concrete and other civil engineering structures behave under long-term radiation exposure in nuclear environments. It focused on developing methods for assessing the condition, durability, and structural integrity of these materials using both experimental data and advanced simulation models. The four-year project officially concluded at the end of April 2025.
Our teams at Centrum výzkumu Řež were involved in two key work packages – WP5 (Assessing the performance of irradiated concrete) and WP6 (Dissemination, communication and training). Our main contribution was a unique irradiation experiment on aggregate conducted in our LVR-15 research reactor, followed by post-irradiation examination in our Hot Cell laboratories. This combination allowed us to obtain high-quality experimental data for the calibration and validation of numerical models, supporting the prediction of long-term concrete behaviour in structures such as biological shielding in nuclear facilities.
Participation in ACES brought not only technical know-how, but also new research opportunities. We established active collaborations with CTU (Czech Technical University in Prague) and the Secondary Technical School Dušní, involving students in sample preparation and expanding our research through follow-up projects.
The ACES project may be over, but the research continues.
More about the project: https://aces-h2020.eu
