FARMINGTON HILLS - The concrete industry's Strategic Development Council (SDC) held its regular fall meeting earlier this month with focus on Building Information Modeling (BIM), performance concrete, self-consolidating concrete, and Technology Showcases.
Session #26 was held at the Inverness Hotel & Conference Center near Denver, Colo., Oct. 1-2, with over 70 SDC members and attendees participating. The session offered 14 presentations on various topics of emerging concrete technologies.
During the meeting, Building Information Modeling (BIM) was discussed at length, and SDC secured a total of $75,000 from the Charles Pankow Foundation and the RMC Research Education Foundation. SDC will use these funds for strategic planning and development of roadmaps, with an immediate goal to provide interoperability standards, whose absence is an obstacle to wider use of BIM in the concrete industry. This initiative to drive a more widespread use of BIM in the concrete industry will be coordinated with the American Concrete Institute's (ACI) newly formed technical Committee 131, Building Information Modeling of Concrete Structures. Peter Carrato was a featured speaker on BIM during the SDC session, and will chair the ACI Committee 131's first meeting at next month's ACI Fall 2009 Convention in New Orleans.
A final report on the research of formwork pressures for self-consolidating concrete was presented by the principal investigator, Dr. Kamal Khayat of the University of Sherbrooke located near Montreal, Canada. Results of this two-year, $385,000 research program - with 40 percent funding coming directly from SDC members - will be used to provide technical data for ACI committee 347, Formwork for Concrete. It is anticipated that research results, which include suggested formulae for computing formwork pressures and suggested field testing equipment, will provide guidance and technical information to the industry when using self-consolidating concrete.
In addition, meeting attendees viewed four Technology Showcases, which have become a staple of SDC meetings. These allow industry innovators to provide information on emerging concrete technologies that have the potential to improve and possibly transform the concrete industry. At Session #26, the Technology Showcases included "Techniques of Recycling Demolished Concrete & Asphalt into Specification Aggregates for Reuse," "Verifi: Process Control for the Ready Mixed Concrete Industry," "Vitro Minerals: VCAS White Pozzolans, High Performance SCMs for Use in Sustainable Concrete," and "Carbon-Neutral Rice Hull Ash: A Green Supplementary Cementitious Material."
SDC has announced its next regular meeting will be held May 6-7, 2010 in Kansas City, Mo. For more information on SDC and its meetings, please visit www.ConcreteSDC.org.
