Welcome everybody. Thank you for joining us today. As Stephanie said, my name is Gary Pooley and I'm going to be joined by Adam Brodahl today as we go through this. Before we get started, Stephanie mentioned something interesting to me just before we got started and that is the Blackhawks, as you all know, won the Stanley Cup. So she called early and said we might have some interference because they're doing the ticker tape parade right below her office. So it's kind of ironic that that's happening at the same time we're giving a high performance athletic facilities precast talk. Learning objectives for today. The learning objectives are to discuss the basis of athletic facility design, describe the key considerations of high performance design relative to athletic facilities, and to describe the various elements used in precast concrete athletic facilities and to explain how to maximize the value of using precast concrete systems in those same athletic facilities. What is a high performance structure? The U.S. government defines a high performance structure as one that integrates and optimizes on a life cycle basis all major high performance attributes including everything from energy conservation to operational considerations. There are several components of this definition that we should consider. The first is sustainability. Sustainability is part of high performance in that all of the procedures and practices we have developed in the past 10 to 15 years are included. In other words, high performance is a larger umbrella that encompasses sustainability and more. The second is that high performance structures integrate and optimize all relevant attributes. Hence this is not a this and that approach. This is one of the things that LEAD and other programs have been criticized for is that they can leave out important concepts as part of the design. The third is that high performance looks at performance of a structure for the long term, not just the upfront cost. This shift can influence our decisions about design and especially material selections as we look at 50, 60, and 70 year service lives. As a sales rep, I've been in the position many times where I've watched my clients really focus on that upfront cost. You're starting to see a little bit of a shift and it's a good shift to look at that long term dollars that they're going to spend on that structure and maybe it's worth spending a little bit more upfront to save those dollars later. So high performance concrete. Precast concrete is a high performance material that integrates easily with other systems and inherently provides the versatility, efficiency, and resiliency needed to meet the multi-hazard requirements and long term demands of high performance structures. When we take into account optimizing all the attributes relevant to a structure, sustainability, and long term performance, Precast provides all of these things in one high performance material. Let's talk about attributes and benefits. Precast inherently provides many attributes and their related benefits. These have been organized into three high level concepts. The first is versatility, which refers to the versatility in aesthetics and design as well as the structure use. The second is efficiency in design, construction, and throughout operation. And then resiliency to provide long term durability and safety. High performance materials provide all three of these items. Now we're going to get into the beef of the presentation. We are going to talk about three basic types of athletic facilities today. Stadiums, arenas, and then a third group of other dedicated facilities for outdoor and indoor use. Here's some definitions and I took these right out of the dictionary, but a stadium is a venue of mostly outdoor sports, concerts, and other events and contests consisting of an open air field or stage either partially or completely surrounded by structure designed to allow spectators to sit and view the event. Whereas an arena is an enclosed area. It is often circular or oval in shape and designed to showcase theater, musical performances, or indoor sporting events. And then there's this bigger group of other facilities. They can be dedicated. They can be multiple use. Tennis, baseball, aquatic centers are becoming more popular. Soccer, hockey, fitness centers, speed skating, horse competition venues, track and field, other Olympic style events, motor sports, and basketball. All one has to do is watch ESPN 2 or the X Games to kind of see what the next series of sporting events that we're going to be watching in some of these venues. This next slide I found very interesting so I thought I would include it. As Stephanie said earlier, our facility here in Maple Grove, Minnesota is involved in the new Minneapolis Stadium, the home of the Vikings. So here's a study that shows that their previous home, the Mall of America, was built in 1982 and it's a comparison of old versus new. What's interesting about this is that in 1982, the cost of the Metrodome was $55 million. Today's cost of the new stadium is $975 million, which I think today is well over $1 billion. The square footage of the old facility was 900,000 square feet. The square footage of the new facility is 1,750,000 square feet. So it's almost double. The seating and club levels, and this is important because back in 1982, a lot of the stadiums that were built had a lower bowl and an upper bowl. The trend now is to have the lower bowl and the upper bowl and a lot of intermediate bowls to allow for club level seating and some of the higher end seating. So in this stadium, the old stadium we had three levels and the new stadium will have seven. The seating capacity, the 1982 structure was built for 64,000 seats, spectators. The new Vikings Stadium will be 65,400. So if you stop right there, what's really interesting about this is the seating capacity really only went up about 2%. The square footage almost doubled. And as we go down the list here, you can see the club level seats in the old stadium, 243 versus 8,000. The club lounges, we had one now we'll have seven. Suites, we're at 87, now we'll have 116. And accessibility seats, we were at 190 and the new stadium will have 658. Some other considerations is the concourse width. Old versus new, we were at 24 feet and now we're going to be 32 to 50 feet in areas. So they're having much wider concourses. Restroom fixtures, we went from 435 to 979. Everybody would be happy about that that visits this facility. Video boards, we had two totaling 646 square feet and we'll have two that are 12,560 square feet. Elevators and escalators, the old stadium had a total of three and we'll have 45 in the new stadium. So I wanted this to be part of the program because it really told us that they're building these facilities not necessarily to fit more spectators, but for a better spectator and a friendlier environment for the spectator with all the amenities. Next we're going to talk about the precast components used in athletic facilities. This particular drawing is a concept drawing of the University of Minnesota football stadium, TCF Bank Stadium. And if we continue on here, next slide is of a bowl section and I included this just to show, as we talked about earlier, that it's not just the lower bowl and the upper bowl. There's a lot of intermediate bowls, again to create some of those higher end seatings at the club level and such. This particular drawing shows the use of precast columns, precast raker beams, and precast stadia risers along with the associated tubs and closure panels. First we're going to talk about precast and pre-stress columns. Columns are commonly used in structures like this. Precasters will often determine if they're going to precast the column or if they're going to pre-stress the column. Basically pre-stressing is replacing the vertical mild reinforcing bar with high strength stress strand. If you do that, sometimes you can get a greater moment capacity out of the precast column than you can out of a cast-in-place column and that can lead you to a smaller column section. The next slide shows a precast raker beam and there's a couple of different types of raker beams that we've been using. This particular one is a rectangular beam that was, you could pour it vertical or you could pour it on its side. It has a series of flat embed plates on the top, whereas after we stripped the beam, we welded some cut tube steel and filled it full of concrete to create the bearing haunches for the stadia risers. It's also interesting to note in this photograph that a lot of times with the way the structure is framed, you can have some areas of tough access for installing. That yellow beam you see on the top of the screen there is a spreader bar we used to be able to get that precast component in where the steel element above was interfering, it was in the same line. Next we have a precast raker beam with a stepped top. So this particular raker beam was poured with the bearing seats as part of the pour for the stadia risers. So if you've ever seen them try and do this on-site in a cast-in-place raker beam with these steps, you look down in the form before they pour the concrete, you look at all the reinforcing in there. Sometimes there's so much reinforcing in there it's a wonder that they can even get the aggregate of the concrete to get in the form and hit the bottom of the form with all the reinforcing. So by doing this at a precast facility, you can use prestressing strands and minimize or have less steel in the raker beam, allowing more flexibility for embed plates and bearing plates and such. There's a third type of support system for risers and that's a precast raker wall. A lot of times on the lower bowl, if that very lower area can't be used, in other words there may not be room enough for rooms down there, instead of using two separate columns and a big two-foot wide raker beam, you can do a raker wall and this wall can be anywhere from 8 inches thick to 12 inches thick. Gary, these raker walls and the raker beams are often the heaviest piece on the project, so it's always important to take that in consideration to make sure that you have enough gantry and mold gantry capacity in the building and that the crane is designed to handle those pieces on projects. That's a very good point. Next are closure wall systems and this can be a multitude of different pieces and shapes. This particular photograph and a lot of the photographs we're going to see here are a stadium that's under construction. We chose to do this because you can better see the precast, otherwise all the seats get in the way and you can better identify some of the components. So this particular photograph shows a closure system at the end of the seating bay. So these two pieces are precast, seen another piece of precast here and then you got another precast element that separates one seating level from another. If this being a general seating area and this being a club level area above it. It's also interesting to note that you're seeing some of the vomitory precast walls here where the stairs are. The frame you're seeing off to the left of the screen is actually for the video board. Now in the past in some of the older stadiums, the video boards were thought of kind of as an after the fact thought where today they're actually discontinuing the seating system and having to put a big structural frame in to support the size of the video boards. Another up-close photographs of some of the closure systems. The one to the left is a again a closure system that is going to separate one seating level from another and the one to the right is actually a press box frame. So the precast risers that you're seeing below that will span full length from raker beam to raker beam. These little six or eight inch thick precast walls are placed on the stadia risers and then a flat slab, a precast flat slab is used to create that flat area for again for the press box. Vomitory walls and stairs. Now this can be one of the trickier parts of a layout. The location when you think about an architect or a designer, they're going to locate the vomitory walls and the exiting system of the stadium that best suits the people that are going to be viewing the sports and get some out of the stadium as quickly as possible. They're not necessarily going to align those with the structural beams and the raker beams. So there can be a challenge as to how do you support these larger openings in the middle of a precast stadia span. So in the upper left it shows the precast vomitory walls with some temporary supports. To the right it shows the view from underneath. It shows those same vomitory walls being supported by the upper riser and the lower riser and along with the two-piece precast stair. On the lower left, and this is an attribute to the flexibility of precast, we were able to combine a precast raker beam and a closure panel in one piece. And then we included the photograph in the lower right just to give you everybody an idea of some of the odd shapes that are required and how precast can easily achieve those odd shapes to meet the design. The precast stadia risers. Obviously this is going to be the majority of the elements in a precast frame. The photograph we're looking at shows the installation process. So you can see the two or three bays of risers that have been set in this upper bowl. The open bay to the right shows where a precast tub has been installed. And the tub is the very first or the lowest stadia piece. It includes the walking aisle for the viewers along with that first area that the seating connects to. This is another section photograph of a precast tub. Again, this is under construction and it just shows you there's some temporary rails there which will be eventually replaced by a piece of glass. So it shows that pedestrian walking path along with that first rise and run for the stadius to be connected to. Again, tubs can be one of the trickier parts of a precast or any stadium in that how do you support them? The photographs that we're looking at now show the raker beams and it shows what we call a kazali hanger or a steel hanger extending from the end of the raker beam to support the first tub. They do this because obviously it would be easier if you could just increase the depth of the raker beam by about two feet and have a bearing element come under the entire tub, but because of the importance of the sight lines, you just can't lose that two feet. One thing that's interesting to note here is that that tub is cantilevering off of the face of that raker beam. So there's a moment couple connection on the vertical stem member of that tub, but it does not have full bearing at each end. It's sitting on a kazali and then there's a moment couple up above. I included this photograph because it's interesting. Almost every stadium that we've worked on, you get into a situation where you have a piece of precast that needs to tuck under some structure that's already been created. This is a device, this iron device, we call it the Iron Man. It hangs from the crane. To the right, you can see the counterweight and to the left in the shade there, you can see the men installing that uppermost piece of stadia section. Again, it seems like no matter what stadium we're working on, we tend to get ourselves into a position where you got to tuck under a piece and this is how that's easily handled with precast. Now we're going to talk about the different types of stadia sections. So depending on your local producer or where you are in the United States, there can be a preference to do single risers or double risers, where you're basically pouring and installing two sections at a time or even triple risers. The specification for a stadium will leave that somewhat open to the precaster and give the local precaster some flexibility. And the last type is a tub. So that's what we were talking about in the previous slides. We just would like to show a 3D drawing of how that looks. I'm going to turn it over to Adam now to talk about how we design these. Thanks, Gary. So what we're seeing here is a cross section of a stadia riser. This is a slightly more specialized version that we call a hammerhead. It's called a hammerhead because if you take the dimension A plus the flange thickness, it's less than B. An L shape would be the more simple design. So this one's called a hammerhead. The dimension A, that determines the rise in your stadia. That will be determined by the architect and how he lays out the stadium. And then the dimension B is what the designer can use to control the moment capacity and design for the minimum mass, the minimum frequency of that riser. There are two types of seating that can occur in these stadiums, either a bench seating or a fixed seat. The bench seating we'll see will have a higher load per square foot because it's possible at the end as people are filing out or rushing the field that people will be standing both on the bench and on the floor surface. You don't find that in fixed seating where people will be standing on the seat and on the floor at the same time. So the density of people on the riser is less. We also find that there's been a tendency to go with longer stadia and we're also seeing that there's a higher requirement for vibration design. A lot of times you want to get involved in that early when you see the spec and make sure that the two are compatible, that both can be met. So when we get into the vibration design and precast, what we're talking about is we're talking about the natural frequency in the floor system. We have to worry if it's close to the forcing frequency because the frequency resulting from applied force or activity can end up creating deflections in the system that can become significant. The motion will be perceptible and possibly even annoying. Your level of perception is relative to the activity of the occupant. If a person's at rest, they'll tolerate much less vibration than a person performing an activity such as dancing. The human body is sensitive to frequencies in the range of four to eight hertz. This is similar to how we're sensitive to sounds and the frequencies between 50 hertz and 30,000 hertz. You wouldn't be able to hear things below 50 or above 30,000 hertz just like you wouldn't be able to feel the vibrations that are out of this four to eight hertz range. Now that comes to be very important because a lot of floor systems and these riser systems are commonly within this range. These are the vibrations you're going to feel in these risers. You'll be able to feel them. I'm going to go through some vocabulary when it comes to vibration and I'll try to explain some of these things. I have an example that will follow that will hopefully help too. Natural frequency. This is the frequency at which a system tends to oscillate in the absence of any driving or damping force. Frequencies are measured in hertz. Hertz are the number of cycles in a second. Now everything has a natural frequency and an example of this is if you rap on a door, you'll hear a tone and that's because when you hit the door, it's going to vibrate at a frequency that excites the air and that's the noise you hear. Same is when you have the Coke bottles lined up with different amounts of water in them and you give them a little tap on the side and they each have a different tone. That's because the amount of water is changing the natural frequency of each of those systems. There's a forcing frequency and that's a small periodic driving force that has the ability to produce resonance. Resonance is a large amplitude oscillation that occurs when the natural frequency is in tune with the forcing frequency. The energy of a forcing frequency is stored and accumulates when it is in tune with the natural frequency. Damping is the ability of a system to dissipate the energy of the forcing frequency. The second harmonic is a forcing frequency that is double the natural frequency. Rarely is anything above the second harmonic of relevance in consideration of stadia design. The day Gary came into my office and asked me to help out with this presentation, it was mere coincidence. I truly was on my way back from Toyota where I had my car tire balance. I was in a situation where when I was driving along at 30 miles an hour, I could feel a vibration in the car and that's because the tire was out of balance. Every revolution of the tire, there would be a forcing frequency put into the car. It was matching the natural frequency of the car, so it was resonating and I could feel that vibration. I'd get a little bit above 30 miles an hour and the car would settle down. That's because there was enough damping in the system and the resonance wasn't occurring. Now I'd hit 60 miles an hour and I'd be at the second harmonic and I'd start feeling the vibration again. This is actually a greater vibration because I'm traveling at a greater speed and that tire is more excited and putting more force into the system. Now in a stadia, the second harmonic is usually less. That situation is one where the first harmonic is going to be people exciting the stadium. They're going to be stomping their feet, dancing, walking, marching, that type of situation. We have a capability of doing that at a rate of one to three hertz. Now if you have a concert in that stadia, the beat that's going to the music might be 120 to 180 hertz. Beats. Beats. Beats per minute, sorry. That would be in the second harmonic range, but we're talking about the force coming from a speaker and that's going to be much less than people stomping their feet in unison. So when I'd get above 60 miles an hour, slightly above 60 miles an hour, that force would start to dissipate again. I think everybody wants to know what happens when you hit 90 miles an hour. Oh, the wife just gave me a quick kick to the side, told me to slow down. Well thank you Adam. So like Adam said, this is an important part of the design of stadia sections. Not only are we seeing longer spans, we're seeing spans well over 50 feet these days. The hertz requirements, which we used to see somewhere in the neighborhood of two to three, we're seeing six, seven, and eight these days. And again, the hertz is the amount of times that the seating section will bounce up and down in one second. So if the hertz was defined as being a two, that stadia section would go up and down twice in one second and you'd be able to feel it. If it's an eight, it would go up and down eight times in one second and you'd be less likely to feel it. That coupled, like Adam said, with the different design loads for fixed versus seating and to wrap up how the thing needs to be designed. Yeah, and if you want a reference on this, go to the PCI handbook, there's a chapter in there about harmonics. You'll find that here in the U.S. that we're seeing more of the four hertz requirement and the eight hertz requirement is more of a European standard and we've had good performance and it's going to be really hard to get those 50 foot spans at eight hertz frequency. Okay, thank you Adam. Next we're going to talk about not just the structural elements of the bowl, but the architectural precast elements that can be introduced to the athletic facilities to enhance them. This particular photograph shows to the right a two-piece precast column. The lower part of the column is a buff colored architecturally acid etched precast where the taller element is thin brick cast into the precast, again two pieces kind of coming together to create that column. Halfway up the building you're seeing a spandrel, again with thin brick in the middle and buff colored architectural precast high and low to create a sill look and a cap look. To the left you're seeing those same columns along with some arches, precast arches over the pedestrian entryways. They did something pretty neat in this stadium, you'll see the signage. That was also made out of precast panels. Those names represent the counties in the state. So if you were to go to this football game and you're going to meet someone, you'd say I'll meet you at the Ramsey County entrance or the Pope County entrance, pretty unique way of doing that. The next photograph is of the Lucas Oil Stadium, again high level precast elements with thin brick and a buff colored architectural element to them. This happens to be one of the many entryways in that same stadium. I wanted to show this just to show the lower portion of it, the lighter buff color is precast concrete with a reveal pattern to simulate block. You can see the sill element above that and then above that you can see the thin brick. It's interesting to note the care that was taken to create the arch in a precast element. I tell my clients a lot of times, we have a builders exchange here locally in Minnesota and if you look on there once in a while, you'll see projects that are coming up for bids and it's re-tuck pointing of a masonry building. With precast and thin brick, you will never see a tuck pointing project on the builders exchange because of the high strength concrete that used and we're reaching anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 psi and the bond that you get on the brick, it's pretty tough stuff when compared to mortar. We're going to talk about some special framing types and we have a series of drawings that depict how to handle stairs, press boxes, field entry walls, vomitory walls, TV platforms, and accessibility seating. As we go through this, the one to the left will be a view from above and the one to the right will be a view from below. This particular frame is a vomitory and stair opening in the mid span of a precast seating section. This happens to be the lower bowl, so we were able to just run the two walls in purple down to a foundation to create the vomitory walls. The little spandrel in green up above is just a closure spandrel for pedestrian and you can see the stair that hangs off the lower riser and goes down to the foundation. The next one is a precast vomitory and stair framing stadia at the mid span with a turn in the seating. So again, what's done here is the uppermost full length riser and the lowermost full length riser will support the vomitory walls and their associated closure panels and then also support the stair system, which in this case is a two-piece stair system with integral landings. The landing in this case I think was supported by either a small precast column or a small tube steel column. A very efficient way to create that opening in the stair. The next drawing shows at the lower level of the stadium a field entry for either the band or the players. It also encompasses a stair for the pedestrians to get from that lower level inside the stadium up to the seating area. So you can do both of those all with precast elements. This slide shows a TV platform. Now in the past, TV platforms weren't, there wasn't specific areas of a stadium that would be designed to support and handle the equipment needed for the TV equipment, but in today's modern high performance stadiums there are. So precasts can very easily accommodate this by again supporting some small type vomitory walls with a flat floor section. Field access framing. So again, precast walls, closure walls, very large vomitory type walls can be created to allow access into the field. Monster truck rallies are becoming more popular. So you're seeing the need for some larger and larger openings for those vehicles to access some of these stadiums and pre-test is a very easy way to do that. This is the same system but at the corner of the stadium just showing the flexibility of how it can handle the curve of the stadium and create that same opening. Press boxes and things like that very easily handled in red or orange you're seeing the full-length stadia risers in purple are the closure walls that sit on top of those stadia risers and in green is a precast flat slab to create the flat area for the press box or the accessibility seating. Special framing types really the same thing we just included this to show the versatility of precast and how it can easily accommodate some of the odd shapes that are required. The support of all these wall systems so we've taken a look at all these different framing types and and we've said that it's normally supported by that or sometimes supported by the uppermost stadia section and the lowermost area section. Sometimes that's not the case and we need to add a beam which is shown here in yellow. Very easily hidden this is a view from the underside of this particular stadium and that's what can support those mid-span openings when the risers cannot. We'll talk about installation for just a minute. As precasters we've all used vacuum lifts for quite some time. We've used them in our plant to handle small architectural pieces. What we're seeing lately is the use of these vacuum systems in the field. This particular device is an Aerolift vacuum lift. There are many other brand names out there that will do similar things and we're using these to not only place the risers on site but we're using them to strip the forms and to rotate the panels out of the in the plant. So in a sense if you took a stadium like the Minnesota Vikings Stadium and we figured we'd have 24,000 stripping inserts and 24,000 erection inserts because those particular risers are single risers and they're poured upside down so the exterior face, the walking surface is down in form. So by using these vacuum lifts we're able to save the 24,000 stripping inserts and the 24,000 erection inserts and we're also able to eliminate the patching of those inserts as well. I'm just going to go through a series of photographs here. This is a photograph showing the vacuum lift supporting a piece lifting it off the truck. This is a far away view of a little bit shorter piece and it's being swung into position. Here we have that same piece as the fellows are getting ready to install it on the raker system and this is a close-up of them gently pushing it into place. The vacuum lift system is redundant engineering. It's got two air tanks so it's designed and its capacity is just based on one of those air tanks should something happen to the other one. It's a fixed vacuum system so if the gasoline or diesel powered engine on top of the device were to run out of gas it would maintain its suction. The operator has a remote control on his belt. If something were to go wrong with the device, say it were to run out of gas, say it were to start to lose air out of one of the hoses, the operator's device on his belt will vibrate. There's a horn and a light that goes off on top of the device and when we tested this we purposely ran it out of gas and we purposely let one of the tanks all the air out of one of the tanks and I think our study indicated that we had 41 minutes before we started to lose suction on the piece. So it's very impressive. This is the same device just showing it configured to handle a longer riser piece. Expansion joints. Expansion joints, the location of the expansion joint is determined by the structural engineer and the architect, but PRECAST can easily accommodate these by means of the block out shown. I've included a diagram of an expansion joint just to show everybody how complex they can be. What they'll ask for is a one, one and a half inch recessed area on each section of the riser and the joint between will have this accordion style expansion joint. It's important to note that there's obviously structure required on either side of the expansion joint by means of PRECAST columns and beams. Drainage systems. Drainage systems, obviously you'll have that in an outdoor stadium because you have to get rid of the rainwater. You see it most of the time in an indoor stadium as well in terms of cleaning. This particular one is in the lowest section of this, the tub section, the lower section of the system and the topping was poured. So we left two inch area for the topping to be poured to on-site to create a compound slope that we would need to get the water and the wastewater to the drain. This is a stair section. This particular piece is unique because there's only two PRECAST elements. The upper is a PRECAST stair and landing combination piece and the lower one is the stair. You can see how it's easily supported by a small tube steel or PRECAST column. You can see at the landing that the top of the stairs held down a little ways. We now know the importance of having a consistent rise and run on a stair so we don't create any tripping hazards. So we hold that down so we can come in later with the pour so we need the two pieces to match up and get a nice consistent stair. PRECAST steps or accelerated steps in the main bowl, they can be PRECAST or they can be cast in place. This section shows a two-step system. The railings contractor can easily drill into the stadia section and epoxy grout their railing system in place. So this is an overall view of the Minnesota Stadium that will hold the home of the Minnesota Vikings and so you can see some of these elements all coming together in the lower bowl, the upper bowl, and some of the intermediate levels along with the vomitory systems and again those accelerated step systems with the rails going in. There are a group of other facilities out there. This particular one is a city-owned ice rink. What you're seeing is PRECAST insulated walls, 12-inch insulated walls that can achieve an R-17 and R-18 value and it's got thin brick cast into the outside of it. So a very economical way to create a large wall system with a durable interior finish. This is that same stadium with the PRECAST riser system. So below this seating area are the locker rooms and the coaches rooms. I included this photograph just to show the ease of how it is to connect a bench seating system to a PRECAST riser. The next photograph is the interior of an ice arena. In the background you're seeing a PRECAST insulated wall. This PRECAST insulated wall supports the long span joists that have bottom cord bearing which allowed for this ribbon window to let natural lighting in and I thought it was a wonderful use of PRECAST again to be able to support by means of bottom cord bearing those long span joists and allowing them to put the windows in to let all the light in. This particular facility is a collegiate facility at a football field. This facility is total PRECAST other than the glass you see. It houses not only the ticketing and the concessions but it houses the coaches rooms, the training rooms, and the locker rooms. So by building a dedicated facility like this you're able to take all those little entities that were on campus in different buildings and put them in their own building. On the other side that you can see just a little bit of it here is the seating section, the spectator seating. Another good use of PRECAST, this happens to be in addition to a school that was built 25 years ago. To the left is the existing facility and to the right is a new gymnasium. This gymnasium was created using 12 inch insulated walls again with thin brick. A very good match to the existing facility. Grandstands can be built out of PRECAST as well. Sometimes you'll see them built out of aluminum which can create a lot of vibration and get kind of loud. So PRECAST is another very good high performance material to use for grandstands. I'm going to do a quick case study here. We had the challenge of creating a new state-of-the-art indoor soccer facility that replaces a large inflatable white tent type style dome and we're seeing more and more of those around on those big inflatable tents. They're kind of an eyesore in a community and when you're inside you can't see what you can't see what's going on outside. This is what we ended up with. A very state-of-the-art soccer facility using PRECAST exterior walls. So the overview. This is a new 900,000 square foot multi-purpose high performance sporting facility. The dimensions of the facility were 240 by 364. The city owned and operated. The general design approach was a steel frame structure with long span steel joists supported by steel columns and beams. 10 inch insulated PRECAST cladding spanned horizontally when stacked on top of one another. So we had to create a 50 to 60 foot tall wall. We did it with a series of four to five horizontally spanning PRECAST elements that were stacked on top of one another. Architecturally speaking the challenge was how do you create this big box without overtaking some of the other buildings on campus and structurally speaking there was a unique design issue that because the columns the steel columns that support the steel roofs were almost 50 foot tall they had to be sized to take a very large axle load which increased the size of them which became an undesirable column size to have on the inside of a sporting facility. So how did PRECAST achieve the desired result? Architecturally speaking the PRECAST walls were designed with a combination of three different exterior finishes sandblast, acid etch, and exposed aggregate with a unique repetitive pattern that breaks up the large scale of the wall and complements the surrounding structures. From a structural aspect the cladding actually helped reduce the steel column size. The horizontal panels were stacked on the exterior foundation wall and spanned between the steel columns for lateral support against wind. The PRECAST panel connection, the PRECAST panel connection to the steel columns provided the additional benefit of bracing the column from twisting. This allowed a significant reduction in the column size. So basically there's an initial twisting that wants to happen on a column and by tying it to the PRECAST wall we're able to overcome that and reduce the size of the column. On the benefits PRECAST provided a durable interior finish. The 10-inch insulated walls were able to achieve higher than expected R value of R17.75 and the director of Parks and Recreation Bob Clapp commented that even during construction and prior to the heating and cooling system being installed he could observe that the building was maintaining a constant temperature thus playing into the benefit of the thermal mass of the concrete walls. And then this is just a view of that same facility showing a soccer event. I'm going to go through this really quick. This is a animation that we've all used 3D modeling and we're all starting to use it more and more. This is a sketch-up model that was created upon a customer's request. So there was an existing school that had a gymnasium edition, a theater edition, wrestling, and locker rooms. So we created this to show this customer how the installation process would work with PRECAST. As you can see this particular structure is surrounded by three streets so it's a tight site and you know with school going on at the same time they were very interested in how is this all going to play out. So we were able to create this and show them. What we're seeing now is the theater backstage being put into place. Previous to that the bigger box was a gymnasium. You can see the proscenium opening going into place. So each movement or each frame represents a day. So we were able to do this. We were able to show the customer that we were able to put up the gym in just eight working days. The theater went up in nine working days and all together the entire structure went up in just under seven weeks. Environmental impacts. Now let's look at this from an environmental aspect. What is the environmental impact from using high-performance PRECAST concrete relative to other systems? PCI conducted a life cycle analysis, LCA, and it was a cradle-to-grave followed ICO 14-040 and 14-044. It was third-party verified. The baseline building was a five-story commercial office, 130 person occupancy, designed per IBC 2006 and ASHRAE 2007 with a 73 year life service life. The window-to-wall ratio was 0.4. Climate zones were figured in four climate zones Miami, Memphis, Denver, and Phoenix. The life cycle analysis systems matrix. We use three different structural systems, steel cast-in-place and PRECAST. Five enclosure systems were used. Curtain walls, brick with steel, PRECAST concrete, insulated PRECAST concrete, and insulated PRECAST concrete with thin brick. Environmental impact findings. The use stage operational energy has the greatest environmental impact for any structure or enclosure combination. So the use stage is about 96% of the overall impact on the environment. The COV among structures and enclosures combinations given climate zones was 2% or less. PRECAST concrete systems do not impose additional environmental burdens related to the system studies. So the conclusion is is that PRECAST concrete is ideal construction material for use in athletic facilities due to its inherent ability to meet the unique design requirements of today's high performance structures including design flexibility, ability to meet tighter tolerances, desirable architectural finishes, the natural thermal mass that it has, durability, and longevity. The life cycle analysis that we just spoke of. And that is the end of the presentation. So thank you all for listening.

high performance athletic facilities

precast concrete

sustainability

versatility

efficiency

resiliency

vibration control

architectural precast elements

construction material