What Challenges Does UHPC Development Face? Cost, Standards and Talent Bottlenecks, and Qinglong's Breakthrough Path

The UHPC industry currently faces four major challenges—"high costs, lack of standards, shortage of specialized talent, and insufficient market awareness"—that constrain its large-scale adoption. Drawing on 28 years of hands-on experience, Qinglong Group has gradually overcome these difficulties through large-scale production, participation in standard-setting, establishment of training systems, and strengthened market education. On the cost side, through bulk procurement of raw materials and process optimization, we have reduced the unit price of UHPC from 20,000 RMB per cubic meter in 2010 to 8,000–15,000 RMB per cubic meter today; yet this is still 20 times the cost of ordinary concrete, so we must persuade clients based on full life-cycle cost.

An imperfect standards system is a barrier to application. Domestic UHPC product standards, design specifications, and construction codes do not yet provide full coverage, leading design institutes to apply it cautiously. As a contributing unit of JGJ/T423-2018, Qinglong Group has promoted the standardization of performance grading and testing methods. We recommend that projects adopt an integrated "design–production–construction" model to avoid the risks of standards gaps.

The talent gap constrains industrial upgrading. Technical personnel with interdisciplinary backgrounds in materials science, structural design, and construction management are scarce. Qinglong Group has partnered with Tongji University and Tsinghua University to run training courses, cultivating more than a hundred professionals annually. Meanwhile, we have built a digital knowledge base to lower the barrier to technology application.

Market awareness requires long-term cultivation. Many owners still regard UHPC as an "expensive material," overlooking its overall value in structural weight reduction and maintenance savings. Qinglong Group demonstrates its benefits through more than 500 successful cases; for example, one project using a UHPC curtain wall achieved a full life-cycle cost 15% lower than natural stone. Challenges are also opportunities—leading manufacturers will drive the breakthrough through technology-driven cost reduction and ecosystem building.