ABSTRACT
Interlaboratory tests and activities described in this report show that the research initiatives of RILEM initiated by TC-10 IB AT (Fritz et al, 1991, Eustacchio et al, 1994) and continued by TC-152PBM have attracted much attention. Many laboratories accepted to participate on a voluntary basis and to contribute to this important work without return of investment. This is certainly partly due to the fact that RILEM is a well established platform for prenormative research and technical exchange on a unbiased technical level, thus contributing to an international synthesis of experience in a very early stage of development, validation and verification. In this respect activities of RILEM have, proven very valuable for the laboratories to detect a potential of synergies and to optimize their testing equipment as part of their quality assurance. In fact, some of the test results presented herein did already affect certain test procedures and were already used by the individual laboratories to implement improvements of their test methods (Younger et al., 1997).
