Good afternoon. Welcome to PCI's webinar series. Today's presentation is Green Code, Sustainable Building Systems with Precast Concrete. This webinar is sponsored by Ultraspan Technologies. My name is Nicole Cloud, Marketing Coordinator at PCI, and I will be your moderator for this session. Before I turn the controls over to your presenter for today, I have a few introductory items to note. Earlier today, we sent a reminder email to our registered attendees that included a handout of today's presentation. That handout for this webinar can also be found in the handout section of your webinar pane. If you cannot download the handout, please email pcimarketing at marketing at pci.org. Note that all attendee lines are muted. The GoToWebinar toolbox has an area for you to raise your hand. If you raise your hand, you will receive a private chat message from me. If you have a question, please type it into the questions pane where I will be keeping track of them and will read the questions to the presenter during the Q&A period. Also, a pop-up survey will appear after the webinar ends. Today's presentation will be recorded and uploaded to the PCI eLearning Center. Questions related to specific products or publications will be addressed at the end of the presentation. PCI is a registered provider of AIA CES, but today's presentation does not contain content that has been endorsed by AIA. Today's presentation is non-CEU. Our presenter for today is Bernard Leitner, Managing Director of GreenCode. He has extensive experience in leading diverse positions in the precast concrete industry. As Managing Director of GreenCode, Bernard is at the forefront of innovation in sustainable precast concrete building systems. He is also the Innovation Development Manager for Progress Group and has a rich background in international business administration, design, and organizational software systems. I will now hand the controls over so we can begin our presentation. So, hello everyone. I hope you can see my screen. Can you see my screen? I'm not sure. I can't see your screen, Bernard. You cannot? No. That is not good. Now? I cannot now. It worked a minute ago. Why doesn't it work now? Okay. This is a good question. I don't know if you can see my screen, Bernard, but I can see your screen. Okay. This picture now. It looks like we are seeing that people can see your screen, so it may just be on my end that I cannot. Okay. Then, I hope everyone can see me. A quick hello to everyone. I'm just going to start the presentation and I'm going to switch off my webcam in a second. I just wanted to say hello to you guys. My name is Bernard Leitner. Thank you, Nicole, for introducing me. I'm going to switch off my webcam now just to be sure that we have enough bandwidth. I'm just going to start my presentation. Hello, everyone. Again, my name is Bernard Leitner. I'm the Managing Director of Green Code. Just two words about the Progress Group before we begin. We are a European group of companies which has subsidiaries all over the world, starting from the West or from our West in Canada and Winnipeg where Ultraspan is located, the sponsor of this PCI webinar today. Then, we have a subsidiary in the States, the American Progress Group located in Chicago. But mainly, and this is where we come from, we come from the center of Europe. We have two huge centers in Europe. One is located in Southrow which is in the northern part of Italy where we have our own precast company and we supply the northern Italian region, Austrian and southern German region with precast elements. We have our headquarter. I'm going to show at the end. I'm just going to show a couple of pictures, a couple of buildings that we did there. Then, we have another company in Italy, another company in Belgium and so on. Then, we have service centers in the East for us, in China, India, and Malaysia. The Progress Group is focused on three major parts, mechanical engineering and solutions for the precast industry where we provide machinery solutions for this sector, software development, every software ERP systems, design CAD systems that interface with the precast industry directly or indirectly. We provide for our clients. And then, we are still very heavily involved in the building industry. In the building industry in the northern part of Italy, as I said, with our own precast plant and since now five years very extensively in developing building systems or not creating them from new but elevating the building systems to the next level. The thing is that we really have a mission as a company and we really want to enable sustainable buildings everywhere in the world and thus enriching the lives of the people all around the world. And we see it through industrialization and digitalization and getting technology into the building industry. This is just one of the things that we can do and we can contribute to the overall building industry to make it a better place to live in. So, this is also why we are heavily invested now in the search for sustainable building systems. This is our headquarters in Brixen in Eutuatia. And the question is why do we think about sustainability? Everybody knows that materials are getting scarce. We don't get enough oil out of the ground. We see it all the time. Things get more expensive and therefore, we really try to put as much technology, as much innovation into the building systems and getting it to the next level. And therefore, our mission is to sustainably create better living conditions for everyone. It's not that we want to do it only for ourselves or for our clients. We really think that it's our goal for this generation but also for the generations which come after us that we increase the living conditions. It's just that so many people still live in such low-level living conditions and we accept still a meager quality to high prices which is just not necessary. The technology is there. It's just that the question that we have to move as an industry into this position. The ideas how to involve this does not only come from our headquarters. We work with different universities, universities in all over the Europe, all over Asia and also in North America and have great exchanges with them and we get the information back. And we just see and we look what is possible with precast elements and this is just a short example of the new house that was built in Vienna, 100 percent in precast and this is what they call social assisted housing. So it's the price. There was a top edge on what the price was allowed to be for constructing this element. Therefore, the facading is not the nicest but still it is economical. It's thermally and acoustically optimized so that the people live inside do not need to spend much on heating or cooling but have a very attractive life in there. So in the next part I'm just going to talk a little bit about the green code system or more about sustainability and what is our idea behind sustainability. It's not only our idea or it's the thing that we have developed together with several universities and then talk a little bit about the building system and at the end I'm going to showcase a couple of examples, a couple of real life building projects. Also during the presentation I have several projects I'm just going to showcase so that you see that it's not based on just what could be done or what is a possibility to be done so that you get also the confidence that what I'm showing here is already reality. It might not be the reality in the northern part of America but in Europe and in some parts of Asia this building system or this way of producing elements is already something done on the day-to-day business. So moving back again what is green code? Green code has been in operation for about 10 years now and we really work hard on optimizing the living conditions within the building and getting the technology in the building components. So the first step that we developed or the first things that we developed also with universities and with our local government bodies within Europe was the thermal wall. It's a multi-layered wall which is pre-fabricated in the plant. I'm going to show it later on but just to get the outside curtain of the building, the seating structure thermally optimized so having the insulation covered with the concrete layer on the outside. The next part and the next thing that we looked into is the heating and cooling. In Europe it also gets quite cold in winter time so we do need to heat our buildings in the winter time and we need to cool it in the summer time. Since we are all concrete guys we all know that all of our buildings have a lot of mass so the building as a building structure has a lot of mass and if you can keep this mass at a certain temperature over the whole year it really is quite effective and I'm just going to showcase video a little bit later on how we did this. Finally we branched out into the acoustic solution since we do now a lot of office buildings and a lot of office buildings are done You can see my screen, right? You see the third page, correct? Okay, not sure. Yes, we can. Yeah, perfect. Through that we went into the acoustic optimization. At the end I will show you about the acoustic optimization. This by still having a very thin structural layer and a thin overall build-up of the floor so that you do not have to, that you can get the maximum out of the building space that you are allotted during the construction process. So just some impressions of what we are facing here. This is now pictures from Poland or the eastern part of Europe. In the eastern part of Europe we still have massive requirements of living spaces and living area which needs to be built up because they are still lagging behind. They have the requirement to rebuild around 10 to 15 percent of all their living space. So this is just one of the examples that you see over there. So here you have very repetitive buildings which are done in precast very efficiently and very quickly. The interior walls are done with those blocks but all the structural walls as well as the out and curtain walls or the facading elements are done in precast elements with the insulation directly inside. This is another picture of this construction site. This is actually a drone shot. In total there I think now 16 buildings. I haven't visited the construction site yet but I'm going to be there in around two weeks time. And who's interested I can show you some pictures at the end as well. So the site from being very quickly and efficiently being done in precast such elements the amount of labor on site is really, really reduced. But this is not something new. I don't have to tell you this. But with the system that we employ here or the system that I'm talking about here today is that there is still some infill concrete on site. So between the outer and the insulation layer and the inner layer you still have an on-site concrete layer. This is the major benefit that structurally the whole thickness of the wall can be taken into account. Furthermore you do not need to do a redesign. Usually the buildings in Europe or in the most parts of the world where I usually work the buildings are designed for structurally designed for on-site concrete. And here you can take it just one-to-one and do it into precast. You do not have to do any redesign. But this is very basic and also the surface quality is not too good. And I'm pretty sure that a lot of guys you will say hey this is it looks more like a really social assisted housing. And therefore I also had a picture of a nicer building or what I think it's a nicer building. This is a building project where close to where I'm currently located in Innsbruck in Austria where we have the facading elements but still the thermally insulated wall here and the climatic slab which I will be talking later on about. And finally an example from Italy where also multi-residential housing. Here we're talking about a bigger city where they are building those towers, 16 story towers and then repeating those towers. Currently eight have been produced and a total of 26 will need to be produced until the end of the decade. But I wanted to talk about sustainability and this is rather the thing and why I put it up. We and also in parts of the academy or the academy sees sustainability and the things that we do with pre-cost not as only an ecological point of view. You always have to take into account the society, the people that work in our factories, the people that work on our construction sites as well as the economic effort. If it's not economically viable then the system as a whole does not work. And therefore we took this into account and here I just wanted to showcase another very nice building project. This is a single house on the left side, very cubistic with the bulls in front. And I don't want to say that the building industry is very stubborn by showcasing you that cow on the right side. I want to say hey, we have to take the bull by its horn and really tackle this and really go into a different future in terms of the building system and really taking it to the next level. How do you calculate or what is the idea behind sustainable buildings and how is this calculated from an academic standpoint? Usually the formula is as you see it up front here. You have performance by period of use divided by the environmental impacts times the costs of a building. And depending on the factor or the ratio that you get after there, it's either economical and sustainable or it's not. How does this work now for the pre-cost industry? We've done here a lot of work and so we set it on the top part in terms of performance. It's the living quality, the design quality as well as the working conditions on-site as off-site times the period of use, how long you can use it. And this divided by the environmental impacts which are again the waste, what is not being able to be recycled, the emissions, the CO2 emissions and all the other emissions as well as the energy requirements times the costs. So where are the things? And here I just can give you a really, really, really short glimpse of what is currently possible and where the developments are currently going. In terms of the material, we have achieved a lot of success with the cement optimizations currently. A lot of our clients or the industry as a whole here in Europe is moving away from using CEM 1, going into the direction of CEM 2, CEM 3. And if we're talking about the Netherlands or the Benelux region, they are even going to CEM 4 or even additional adhesives to bind the gravel together. But by using this, it's the cement optimization. We can really, really put the precast into the next level because within our production, we have a closed system. Within our production, we are usually, or in Europe, we are mainly indoors. So you can really control everything. As well as with the concrete recipe, here the direction in Europe is going into the lightening or making the concrete lighter. Here we have, we did already projects and we had examples of reducing the overall weight of concrete by more than a third by adding perlites into the mix and getting it done as well. Another thing which is currently being used is the use of recycled concrete. In Europe, the regulation is currently that up to 10 percent of the initial material can be recycled concrete. But we go even a step further. Within the system that I'm showcasing here, because we still have some infill concrete on site and we can here go really into a lower grade of concrete within the infill concrete. We can actually use more than 30 percent of recycled concrete in our projects over there. Another thing that which is coming up in Europe is the insulation. The types of insulations we are moving away from mineral based or mineral oil based insulations like polystyrene or expanded XPS or EPS. And we are moving into different solutions. And there we currently have an insulation which is 100 percent mineral based, also perlite based. And in the building system here, the thing is, and I'm going to go into more detail there, is getting the technology into the precast elements. If you have a high quality living area, the people like to live there a lot more. You can generate a lot more revenue over time. But the major effect, and this is something that we feel here in Europe currently very, very deeply, is the price of energy that you need to put into the system to get it either heated or cooled. This can be dramatically reduced. We can reduce the required amount for heating or cooling to around 30 percent in relation to what you use if you use mineral oil based systems. The next step, how we can influence or how the industry as a whole is currently developing. Here we are going strongly into building information modeling. But this is not something that we are going to talk about today. But it's the, more or less, what I wanted to say is the automated production. But I'm just going to showcase the video in a second. Because I wanted to showcase it now. I've been talking now a lot about the system, but I haven't shown you guys what we are talking about when we talk about the automized production or the things, how to produce it. I have here a short video, and I'm just going to start it now, talk over it a little bit, how the elements are produced within our factory. It's a little sped up, the factory, the video. It's not real time. Usually this takes around five to eight minutes to finish one pellet, which is working in a circulation system. And then it moves to the next station. Here we have automated robots placing the distance holders. It's just a small thing. But if you can save one person here, you can also already save a lot of money. The next part would be the mesh. Mesh is automatically created according to the size, together with the cutout of the window that we see here. And this is the distancer that we are using. This is something we call as a girder, and there is a manual work. So the shuttering, the wooden shuttering for the opening was placed by hand or by the personnel. Also the lifting anchors were placed by hand, but then everything is scanned automatically. And there is a guy standing just outside of the picture because he's operating the machinery around, but there is not a requirement for any actual labor to be done. And after concreting, you see here the compacting, and here you see what I told you before. We have a two layer system. So both outside layers are actually metal smooth. So you just need to color or paint the outside layer and you do not have any on-site work. In this case, there was no insulation. This is just a regular wall where they might have put outside insulation or they put insulation. There's no insulation because it's an interior wall. And the curing chamber, which also drastically reduces the required cement grade that you need and having also always the perfect structure. And let me just finish here. So you see here you have a very light element. It's an element which is not very heavy because you see here you only have two sleeves or two leaves of the element, which are around two to two and a half inches thick. So you have enough to be a valid structural layer. There is a mesh inside, and you also have a very, very nice outside part over there. So this was just to showcase what is, when I'm talking about a regular automated factory, I'm just going to showcase a little bit more advanced at the end of the presentation. But I wanted to delve now into the building system. Here are all the components which are part of the building system, and I'm just going to walk you quickly through the components here. Just to give you a little of an example, here is a real life project which is built where there was no, there was also a flat down here. There were not so many, there was no, this is a dining area or dining hall. But this is just to give you the idea that when we are talking about the building system, it's not that it's only individual components. What is promoted here in Europe or what is being done here is it's really a building system where one thing grabs into another, and it's for the investor, for the guy who operates the building, it's a major benefit because the costs of running it are quite low. What we see here in the bottom part, in the garage or in the parking garage, you see here this is not insulated. Well, it's not insulated to the bottom, but into the outside it's insulated, and it's insulated into the heated areas. So what you have here is a prefabricated slab with the insulation already inside. Here just to showcase the climatic acoustic solution, and then just the other walling systems in here. It really depends on the use of the building, and then you see how this works. This is just a basic flooring system or a slab system. So here you also have two, two and a half inch thick prefabricated plates, filigree slab. You guys all know about filigree slab. I'm not going to waste much time on this, but what I wanted to showcase here, it's something that we went into, or this is the development into the future. It's that we put recycled and plastic extruded boxes inside of the, in those filigree slabs just to create voids and create void former slabs. So you can make quite light slabs also here, and getting the, there's still the same structural validity because of the ribs, which the slabs are built into. This is the slab on the bottom, where you see here, we also have a structural layer at the bottom, then we have the insulation inside, and then again, the built up on side. This makes it quite efficient and quite easy. The major benefit that we do it here in Europe is that the transport is quite cheap because you can get a lot of elements around 180 to 200 square meters. Don't ask me what's in square foot, but around 200 square meters per delivery load. So you get a lot of product directly shipped to the client, which is then erected quite easily. The same thing goes here for the climatic slab. This is something I'm going to go into more detail a little bit later on, but this is the heating and the cooling system within the building. This is something where we just use the mass of the building, and with the mass of the building, we heat and cool it, and we include insulation into those slabs. Why we do that, you probably know, and a very famous project is the Apple building in California, which also has a similar system to this, but they put the tubes where water is pushing through inside of the element, and if you put it inside of the element, you have a very, more or less, you have the same system, but the reaction time is quite, it really takes a lot of time if you want to have a change within the system. Here with putting it very on the bottom and putting insulation on top, you make sure that all the, either the heating or the radiation heating or radiation cooling is always going down into the room which you want to temperate. Moving up, there is also an acoustic solution, and this is something that, what I said before with the building of the office buildings, we have quite harsh regulations in terms of the acoustic optimizations of our office buildings, and so we either have to do lowered ceilings with those cardboard boxes or cardboard sheeting just to get the acoustics right, or this is something that we do now, is we take the boxes that you've already seen before, and we have regular cutouts, and then the sound, and then we have insulation back here, we have mineral wool insulation, so the sound travels in, but then it doesn't come out. It's also not a, it's not a new solution, it's something that the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages already employed just to optimize the acoustic solutions, but we did it in an optimized, industrialized way so that this is done quite efficiently. Then the top of the part is the acoustics slab combined with the climatic slab, so you can heat and cool the room and acoustically optimize it as well. So this is more or less the non-plus-ultra, how we say it in Europe, in terms of the slab system. Again, here we see the wall that we've already also seen in the video, the two-sleeve, two-shelved wall with the in-field concrete, twin wall, double wall, or hybrid wall, however you want to call it, but it's, the major benefit here is in the interior walls and in the cellar or basement building. Most of the basements and, yeah, most of the basements here in Europe are done with twin wall. I know of companies in Germany, they do 5,000 to 10,000 basements, single house basements up to, say, a year, and this is a very, very efficient system that just with a crew of three to five guys, you will erect a basement in just three days, then have the construction company move in, fill up the void inside with concrete, and then you're good to go with planking or with just putting a slab on top of the element. But you will never go into an high-risk building with this or in a building where you want to live in because you always need to have the insulation inside. And here we go into two ways, it really depends on the clientele and what the people are looking forward. Here we have the solution, the combination of the two where we still have an infill of on-site concrete within here. You also have the girder just to give it stiffness so that you can produce elements which are 10 to 12 meters long by three or four meters high, so you can do really, really huge elements and still get the stiffness inside. And to have it thermally disconnected from the outside layer, we connect it here with the GFRC pin, and we connect the outside layer to the inside layer. And currently, this kind of product is – yeah, we do not have – Europe does not have enough production capability of this because we do not have enough people to put the insulation on the outside, so we have to move it into the factory. And therefore, to produce such a thing in a factory, you need to have the right production capabilities. And there is still a limited amount, but this is growing. And the same thing goes for the sandwich panel. We have – or something that was developed over the last couple of years, we have a – there is a patent on it, and this is a system where you get a sandwich panel, but which is also metal smooth on both sides, but a little bit later on to this at the end. So, I've been talking now for 35 minutes. I think – I really hope that you could follow, and if you have any questions, please type them into the chat, and I will try to answer them later on. Now, in the next ten minutes, I still have a couple of things I wanted to show you. There is another short video I'm going to show, but before that, I'm going to go a little bit into the application side and how the system works. We've seen the thermal wall. This is the outside. The insulated wall onto the outside, and this is just a reference picture of how the climatic ceiling is working. So, you have the heating and cooling pipes directly inside of the slab. And what I wanted to show you is how does the system work. This system works just as the sun. The sun pushes out radiation heat and heats the earth, and this is the same system that works in the climatic ceiling. So, we have 95 percent radiation heat, so we have warm water, and not hot water, just warm water. We are talking, and you have to – I'm not an imperial guy, I just know the metric system, so we have water with 30 to 35 degrees warmth running through the pipes, and this is enough to heat the room inside. So, we have radiation coming out of the slab, and since the wall is insulated, it is then transferred back inside, and then it heats up everything which is in the room. So, it doesn't heat up the air inside of the room. It really heats up the tables, the floors, and this is really a representation. What you see here with the heat wave camera, you see that actually the TV screen, the sofa, the couch is being heated up through the radiation, because it's the same thing as the sun. It heats up the parts inside of the building. Another benefit is that you do not get a lot of air movement within the room. Air movement is actually something which is not appreciated within a room, because air transfers the germs, the dust, everything throughout the room, so the climatic ceiling has a very smooth airflow. Here if you have a radiator, this would be just a comparison to a radiator or the AC in the summertime where you really push out a lot of air into the building. The same, the system works so that all the surfaces, all the enveloping surfaces are getting heated up. And through this radiation heat, the room gets temperature, gets temperate. And the thing is, it's something that you really have to experience and you have to feel that you actually do not need that high amount of output. 20 degrees in the wintertime is more enough to, that it feels comfortable because everything has, everything is actually warm. Not just parts of it, but everything is getting warm. And the same thing goes for the cooling. In the cooling here, we do have a little bit of radiation because, you know, hot air is going up and then cooling on the top and then we have a little bit of cold air falling down. So, we still have a little bit of convection, but most of it is also radiation cooling. The thing is, what you have to take in mind, this is not comparable to the AC in your car or in your homes where you have just a split, where you really pushes out very cold air, freezing air. This is just, it temperates the whole building and therefore reduces the feeling inside and just gets, it's a very comfortable cold system. So this is a system which is coming up more and more here in Europe, mainly in the region of Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Italy, but now also moving into the East, into Poland, Hungary, and the other Baltic states up there. Now I'm going to show you if it, it does not work. I'm just going to do it, oh, yeah, now this. So this is now a representation of a factory which is coming up where we showcase a very, very difficult system and where we also have automated production and we rather go into the system that you know with those sloped edges on the outside or the surfacing layer at the surface, at a setting surface having a structure. And here in this case, this is the factory which is coming up. So I still have parts over there, the pins as you see in here. And this also goes into the direction that we want to have an outside surfing layer where we have bricks automatically placed on the outside layer. And here you see the shading wall. Yeah, it is pretty quickly, but if you're really interested in this, just give Harsh or any, or us a call and then we can go into a lot more detail over there. It's just automated production, what I wanted to show you here and getting the shuttering automatically placed. And again, the spacer robot. Important here is that there is no perfect way, therefore we do, or such a simulation that you see here is quite important just to get it done. Here is a showcase of reinforcement creation where the reinforcement is welded together, welded to a two-size bent and then transported inside. So you can, all the manual reinforcement being done here, there is no manual reinforcement, it's just automatic reinforcement and the embeds, the windows and so on have to be done manually, but then concreting again automatically. And then the marriage of both elements here again, you see the concrete and then one element is turned into the other, therefore creating two metal smooth surfaces, but still, but this is still a full sandwich panel and we will see now a couple of pictures. This is just a turning device and you see how this has turned into the other element. And then I have just a couple of pictures because I know there is no live video on this yet what the finished elements look like, what you see here, also the electrical installations is done inside and those 3D curved elements or shuttered elements or elements with different surface textures on the outside can be also produced automatically. So here are just some pictures of the facading end wall, or it should be. Here is just a showcase how it's lifted off and transported away. So the shutter, this shuttering is also automatically and then we see a couple of finished elements here. I have to excuse this, it's just andy movie or cell phone movies, it's not yet done. Here you see the pre-shuttering and the de-shuttering and you see now a couple of impressions of how those elements can look like. We have the tiling facade on the outside, we have the sloped facades, polished facades and again with a lot of tiles. In Northern Europe the tiling is quite important and a lot of people really want to use this. So this was just a little example of how the future of production looks like and I'm going to finish off now with a couple of pictures of buildings that have already been finished. Here again you see a polished facade with the acoustic ceiling behind. Here just some impression of the acoustic climatic slab that we've seen before even with the lights, the basic lighting of the building already placed inside and the acoustic optimization is done here all over the slab over here. Now just some impressions of how office buildings can look like or how they are done currently. Here in this case everything was done in visual concrete so there was no after work, it's just there was just a brush work to get very homogeneous concrete cover over here but there was no paint applied here. Again some pictures of the building now alighted but the system since it's very versatile and we have a lot of alpine environment here. The system that I've showcased here is also being used in alpine production a lot. Here we see the top part of a carriage system which was done with the system. Here the same just from the top down. The elements were actually transported by a helicopter so they are not too difficult to transport but they were transported by helicopter. Here another picture of a helicopter which brought the elements on top over here. But this was just a special system. The basic system what I've tried to get across here is here in this case this is a school. This is a school for nurses which was built in the southern part of Germany. This is still during the construction site so you still see a lot of guys working around here but this is an impression of how this system can look like. So you still have the groove or the chamber. This is something you will always have and I don't have to tell you this but this is an expansion joint because since the insulation layer is behind the elements will increase and decrease according to the energy intake. But this is something that the architect can play around. And here in this case I can tell you that this was done very, very efficiently since only those rectangular elements were delivered on site and this is just a false element, just a one-sided element on the outside which is then hooked back into the slab in here just to get it very, very quickly erected and erected with the minimal amount. In this case since I was involved in the project there were three guys and a crane driver built up this building and they took I think a week and a half per floor and then another half week for the construction company to do the on-site reinforcement and concreting and then the next story. But this is just in a very efficient way working with the system. This is something that also is realized with those precast elements a lot, sandwich panels as well as thermal walls, huge construction halls or producing halls. Here we have Technolpin, it's a huge producer of snow cannons. And with another impressions of the high-rise social housing here with colored concrete and different, this is sandblasted or parts of it are sandblasted just to give you a different haptic part over here. And also single or multi-family homes with sloped roofs, also not an issue. This is a project in Italy where it's a three-family home but it's all the same family which is part on the hill. And another example of a single-family home also done in concrete and done very, very price efficient. In this case you see very, very huge elements just to cut out for the windows. The window includes the window shade again already inside and so it's very, very efficient. This was actually a project where the building owner tried to build as cheap as possible because this is in Munich, Germany where the plot size was just astronomical and he didn't have any money for the building then. Just another impression of the other side of the building. And then we go into the higher end, those architectural villas which all can also be realized. Just some impression of very, very high-class architectural villas and also with the detailed design over here and putting the projects over here. And I think with two or three more slides I can just showcase you a couple of things that what we are doing and the major benefit is that reduced labor on the one side inside of the factory because of the automation and the reduced labor on site because you do not need to have so many people working on site. And that concludes my presentation for today, more or less. Now there is the thing, we still have five minutes time. Do you have any questions or are there any questions, anything that I can answer? Thank you, Bernard, for a great presentation. We do have a few questions, so I'll go ahead and ask those. Our first question is, what are the pros and cons of using pre-stressed and non-pre-stressed elements? Well, all the elements that I showed in here today are non-pre-stressed. It's just a different way of thinking in Europe is that we do not require tension in our elements. We do use a little bit more of reinforcement there, but it's even more cost effective because with pre-stress there is not so much automation. With non-pre-stress you can get a lot of automation and a lot of non-manual work. So you do not need specialized labor to work this. Wonderful, thank you. Our next question is, where is this technology used or most viable? Currently it's being used mainly in Europe and the major benefits are in temperate climates and not desert climates because there we have just too many extremes. But in regular Mediterranean or temperate climates this is mainly used, just same thing as Canada or so on. But we do, the system that I showcased here and a lot of the projects that I showcased are based in Europe as well as some are already done in Asia. Before Corona I was also heavily involved within China and they wanted to do a lot of those things, but sadly they just changed policies and currently they are going into a different direction. Thank you. Our next question is, will this technology have an advantage in certain climate areas? Yes, again not extreme climates, especially the humid. If you're thinking about Florida, the heating and cooling system that I showcased here will only work in combination with a dehumidifier because the system is working only up to a certain point. There is the dew point and if the dew point is reached you will not be able to cool with the system anymore. So therefore it will have condensation inside. So in addition to the heating and cooling slab you will still need a dehumidifier for the system to work efficiently. But the overall benefit is that you have a completely different situation for the workers on site as well as in the factory. You just have very, very safe working conditions and which is just really something that the people here are reaping the profits off. It's more or less a repetitive system. So you do not need a skilled mason, you do not need a very high skilled laborer, you just need a person to be able to do repetitive work and it's something rather akin to the car industry. So there are a lot of varieties but it's just a certain amount of varieties and if you have the right instructions this is working quite efficiently and can work very, very efficiently for you as a producer. Perfect. Thank you. We have time for one more question. Did any of these projects use recycled concrete? One that I showed at the beginning, the one in Poland, yes, this used around 10 to I think even 15 percent of recycled concrete in the overall mix. But if you're really interested in the recycled concrete we're doing a lot of projects now and which are coming up where we really do increase the amount of recycled concrete in the current projects. Wonderful, thank you. On behalf of PCI I'd like to thank Bernard for a great presentation. All questions that we didn't get to will be forwarded to Bernard along with your contact information. If you have any further questions about today's webinar please email marketing at pci.org. Thank you again, have a great day and stay safe.

sustainable building systems

precast concrete

building industry

living conditions

thermal walls

heating and cooling systems

acoustic solutions

slab systems

energy efficiency