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Over the past six decades, EllisDon has built some of Canada's most significant buildings, including the SkyDome, and many of the projects we follow these days on UrbanToronto are being built by the highly-regarded construction company too, including the whole Pan Am Village (soon to be the Canary District), the high profile Ryerson Student Learning Centre, the even higher-profile recent rejuvenation of First Canadian Place, and many, many more.
The company is not just content to build the way they always have though, and have a Construction Sciences Department to push ever-forward the construction technology that they employ on every project. Today EllisDon is announcing progress through SCC Under Pressure, a collaborative study on the effects of formwork pressure when using Self-Consolidating Concrete.
"Restrictive codes and standards have led to over-conservative formwork designs, and an increase in formwork costs," said Robert Quattrociocchi, EllisDon's Building Sciences Manager. "This has caused the industry to shy away from this beneficial technology, but our goal remains to prove that not all Self-Consolidating Concrete (SCC) placements produce full hydro-static pressure." Freshly placed concrete in wall and column forms behaves like a liquid, acting laterally on the vertical faces of the formwork. As the concrete changes from a liquid into a solid, the lateral pressure diminishes. The lateral pressure can be equal to a full hydro-static pressure, the same as a column of water, depending on the placement rate and setting characteristics of the concrete. EllisDon's results will be compared to past experimental data to help reduce the negative associations of using SCC.
EllisDon has used SCC on many complex builds, from Toronto's Bay-Adelaide Centre, to Calgary's Eighth Avenue Place, to the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business. As the only construction company backing this initiative, EllisDon is trumpeting SCC's benefits—which include enhanced placeability, reduced noise pollution, and a superior finish—to introduce this innovation company-wide, and across the whole industry.
EllisDon reports that over the past years, various models have been developed to help predict maximum formwork pressure when using SCC, which have now been tested throughout Canada, the United States, and Europe. The SCC study, a continuation of this research spearheaded by EllisDon's Construction Sciences team, was held in Toronto in late August. It centered on establishing a correlation between the models and real-time measured pressure, with the ultimate goal of revising the American Construction Institute's current design codes and standards.
During the event, three research groups—including members of EllisDon's Construction Sciences Department plus; John Gardner, retired Professor from the University of Ottawa; David Lange, Professor from the University of Illinois; Kamal Khayat, Professor from the Missouri University of Science and Technology; and Ahmed Omran, Researcher from the University of Sherbrooke—compared their predictor models against measured pressures by placing different SCC mixtures into eight columns at various casting rates.
EllisDon's Construction Sciences Department under Director Lloyd Keller will present their findings at this year's Construct Canada, a large-scale exposition that connects the buyers and decision-makers of design, construction, and real estate industries to the very latest in products, technologies, best practices, and applications.
UrbanToronto will look forward to a tour in the future when an EllisDon representative can point to some daring concrete engineering and say 'that could not have been built without our advances in SCC use'.
