good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you're calling from today. Thanks for jumping on. Hopefully, here in the next hour, we can cover some information that's relevant and pertinent, and hopefully, we have a little bit of time for questions at the end. I'll try to leave a little bit of time. We'll see how that goes. So, with that, I'll jump right into it here. Becky went over the AIA stuff, so I'm going to mostly skip over that. Again, just make sure you fill out the form if you need to or get registered. The presentation that we're going to do really addresses high-performance building envelopes, how PRECAST fits into that, really looking at how PRECAST fits the latest code requirements, especially the continuous insulation and air barriers, moisture management, and our values. Also going to talk a little bit towards the end a bit about resiliency and how PRECAST is a good product with high winds, earthquakes, really how we're protecting life and fulfilling its intended purpose, and it's not helping you fulfill your intended purposes in life, but how PRECAST fits into making sure that we're safe environments. Learning objectives real quick, just to describe the three basic types of a PRECAST wall or PRECAST envelope system, describe the new envelope code requirements, explain thermal mass and how we can use that with PRECAST to help, and also discuss moisture management methodologies. So what is a high-performance structure? Usually what we think about first is sustainability, and sustainability is clearly a large portion of high performance, but there's so many other attributes that go into it, and we'll look at a lot of these today, especially some the environment and safety and security and durability as we go through here today. So PRECAST is a high-performance material. It integrates easily with other systems and inherently provides versatility, efficiency, and resiliency that we need to meet multi-hazard requirements, the long-term demands of high-performance structures. One thing you notice is that PRECAST inherently provides a lot of these attributes, whether we decide that we're using them or not, they're there. So as we discuss these, you know, hopefully you can kind of see how PRECAST fills more than just some of the intended purposes. So like I said, we inherently fill a lot as we really break the attributes into three different areas, first one being versatility, really referring to its aesthetic design and the structures used. There aren't many things we can't do with PRECAST to help on your exterior facade, but also the uses of PRECAST can be for many different types of structures. Also efficiency in design and construction throughout operations, this is where a lot of our discussion will focus on today, and then also resiliency and providing long-term durability and safety. Two high-performance materials like PRECAST can provide all three. So first we'll just jump into the three different types, the common types of exterior wall systems. So PRECAST, just real basic, is a manufactured off-site in a controlled environment. We have a high degree of quality control. We can use it in all different types of buildings from low-rise to high-rise, offices and retail, shopping centers, theaters, parking, warehouses, just about any building structure can utilize PRECAST. So, you know, in that way it's very versatile. So when we start talking about the three different types of basic wall systems, the first one is just going to be a solid wall. Typically this wall is going to be four or six or eight or ten inches thick, depending on what you're doing with it. This system requires some form of additional insulation, and then usually it's going to be furred out on the inside. So in this case the PRECAST really is just the exterior facade. It's not accomplishing anything else as far as interior finishes. Second type would be an insulated wall panel or a sandwich wall panel, and that's where we use an architectural facing mix and then use an insulation, usually a rigid insulation inside, and then we'll put a backing on top of that or a structural weight on the top of that. When that panel is installed it provides the aesthetic exterior, also provides the insulation of the building, but then also provides an interior surface that doesn't have to be furred out or covered with drywall later on. Then the last type we'll talk a little bit about is the thin shell. Typically this is a PRECAST member that's an inch and a half to three inches of concrete, but it does have to be supported by a frame system. Typically they're going to be a steel frame system that that's cast onto. Oftentimes that frame system can also be what the drywall is installed to later. So GFRC or glass fiber reinforced concrete is a good example of a thin shell system. Most PRECAST systems can be load-bearing or non-load-bearing, and then also they're available in just about any shape and finish. When it comes to deciding if you're going to use it for load-bearing and non-load-bearing, I would direct you to your local PRECAST to really talk about what loading goes into that panel, how it's being used so we can make the best decision on if it's going to be load-bearing or not. As we start to look at how to panelize a system, then there's really several different ways to go at it. If you look at the top left-hand corner in the screen, that's a big wall panel that's got punched the windows out of it, so it's essentially that panel is going to hang from column to column, floor to floor, and then you just leave the window openings blocked out in the PRECAST report and they install the windows on site. If you go down to the bottom left-hand side, that's more of a ribbon system where we have a spandrel PRECAST at the floor line, then they run spandrel glass, and then another spandrel PRECAST, so that's another way to accomplish it. And then the right-hand picture, it's really kind of a combination or it's more of a vertical system. You see the tall white PRECAST members there, so they'll be more of a vertical column cover type piece with some infills in between, so it really just depends on the aesthetic design of the building and how you're putting it together. Again, you'd want to consult with your PRECAST and what's the best way to panelize the building to keep it efficient. So, here's a solid wall panel, and what I wanted to highlight on this one here is the panel runs edge-to-edge, here-to-here, and you'll see that the left-hand side of this is a gray concrete and the right-hand side is a white concrete. That's a six-inch panel where we use a face mix on the down-and-form or the aesthetic side, and that's going to have the expensive aggregates in it. That's where we get the aesthetic qualities, but then we pour that usually about three inches thick and then top it off with that structural gray concrete on top of it, which is a less expensive mix. It's just another way that we can provide the aesthetics we're looking for while trying to control costs at the same time. This is a picture of the Denver International Airport. That is a solid wall we did, and it's a buff concrete poured on a one-off custom liner, and what they're looking for to do with that liner is sort of match the look and feel and undulations of the foothills of the Rockies where the Denver sits. So, that's a good use of a solid wall panel. They did end up furring that out, insulating it, and then putting sheetrock on the interior of that one. Now, we'll look a little bit at insulated wall panels or sandwich wall panels. Again, we talked about you pour a facing white. This one here happens to have both buff precast on it, white precast on it, but then also a brick veneer on it. So, that's all in the facing mix, and then underneath this wood blocking is where the insulation is. So, it has edge-to-edge insulation built into it, and then there'll be a structural backing on top of that. So, again, that panel will be serving the aesthetic exterior, but also insulating, and then additionally can be used on the interior to finish out. So, this is a picture of a dorm we did up in Brookings at South Dakota State University, and on this one, we cast in the brick that you see there. It has two different finishes on the architectural precast portion of it with the two different colors of buff, but on this building, all they did is painted the interior face. They did not fur it out or use sheetrock. They thought that would be a very durable surface for the dorm students, so that way they don't have near as much maintenance to do up there. Here's a thin shell product. This is, again, you can see it's just a thin shell of concrete, but it has the backup system behind it, steel stud system behind it. So, this really helps keep the weight of the system down, but you can also see, if you look over in the picture on the left, there are a lot of things that you can do with this type of a system, so you don't have to give up the aesthetic quality on a thin shell system. A good example of where that was used, you can see these pieces here, these are GFRC pieces, and they were used at the LDS Temple in Fort Collins, Colorado. So, again, very diverse use of different precast there. So, when we look at precast, most of the time, what we're looking at is using precast as a barrier wall or it's face sealed. Really, what we're trying to do there in the envelope is to keep all the water exterior of the precast. Excuse me. Precast is poured with a low water to cement ratio concrete. It has low permeability, high strength, so it easily resists the bulk rain and moisture. Several advantages of this compared to a cavity wall or rain screen system. For instance, they eliminate the cavities where moisture problems can go undetected. Often, poor building health has to do with mold that can develop from water that sits inside. They also reduce construction complexity, since you don't have all the detailing that goes into the cavity wall design. It just makes it easier to put up and also very fast to put up. So, we'll look at a little bit, dig a little bit more into the envelope attributes of how precast helps out. So, one of the first things we'll talk about is just efficiency. When we think about efficiency, we think about use of our resources, our water and the materials in the end, just, I'm sorry, energy. Using precast can help reduce the material, save time, increase the amount of usable floor space inside. I can also think about using a sandwich wall panel, insulated wall panel, you know, as that complete envelope system, leaving other trades that wouldn't have to go on there. We also think about minimal site disturbance. You know, when you're hanging a precast panel, we need room to bring a truck in and a room to sit a crane and you can put a building up. So, you don't need a lot of extra space out there. Accelerated construction. Oftentimes, when I think about accelerated construction, I think about how long it would take a mason on site to set a hundred square foot of wall with brick and we're always going to be there for a while. Conversely, in about an hour, we can hang a 300 square foot brick clad architectural precast panel. So, you can really get that building enclosed a lot quicker once it gets started. Also, reduces complexity, like we talked about before, the barrier wall system with all the detailing that goes into it. Thermal performance. We'll talk a little bit about this as we move forward here, but especially with an insulated wall panel, precast can offer a lot of thermal performance. Reduce the life cycle costs and owner-operated costs. There's not a lot of maintenance to do on a precast panel. The biggest thing is taking care of the joints. Other than that, you know, there just isn't a lot that has to be done. Then, overall, that just results in a better value and long-term performance for the owner. So, let's talk a little bit specific about the thermal performance. So, there's several things that really affect the performance of that envelope, and you have the heat and loss gain from the opaque assemblies. An opaque assembly is what you can't see through, it's the walls, it's the roof. You also have the heat and loss gain from the fenestration assemblies, the windows and the doors and the curtain wall, and then also the amount and the quality of the fenestration, air leakage, and then moisture. So, we really look at how do we control and mitigate those. So, we're going to talk not a lot about the codes. I'm sure most of you are familiar with ASHRAE 90 and then the corresponding IECC code, but they really do get into the R-value and how to look at the R-value, but where they kind of fall short is that they don't really talk about thermal bridging. And so, the NIBS is really looking at how can we quantify that thermal bridging, and instead of just mentioning it, and we'll look at that here in a second, but really how do we quantify it and how much do we lose in that thermal bridging. And then finally, moisture mitigation is not addressed in the energy codes. So, again, that's a different part that we'll need to look at. So, when we design high-performance building, we need to look at the heat, the air, and the moisture, and they're all interrelated. And it's important to understand what's driving behind this, and it's just basic physics. Nature's seeking an equilibrium. What that means is that high pressure moves towards low pressure, hot moves towards cold, and high concentrations move to low concentrations, and all that's just in an effort to seek that equilibrium. So, there's four main components to heat flow management. We'll start with the heat. The first is thermal bridging. Excuse me. I'm sorry. Yeah. So, we'll talk about thermal bridging or just the basic R-value first, and picking the right R-value for the wall system and for the environment that you're in. Then it's also the thermal bridging. That's the short circuits. That's those small areas or sometimes big areas that let the heat through or the cold through. Then we'll talk about eliminating air and moisture leaks. And then finally, we'll talk about thermal mass and the benefit that thermal mass provides precast that other wall systems don't necessarily have. So, when we start talking about insulation, U-value is a measure of heat flow or thermal transmittance. Hence, the lower the U-factor, the less material that connects heat. That's a better thing. So, most people are familiar with this from windows, which are usually rated in a U-factor. So, in this example, the window has a U-factor of 0.36. So, the inverse of that would be the R-value. The R-value is just the inverse of the U-value. So, this window would have an R-value of 2.8. So, the R-value is opposite of the U-value, so it's resistance to heat flow. So, the higher the R-value, the better. On this chart, I look over on the left, and what we predominantly use to build buildings, which is steel, concrete, and glass, don't have a lot of R-value, which is why we have to work on the right-hand side of this chart where the insulation is, because that's where we're controlling that heat flow. There's several different types of insulation that we can use in a precast panel. The first one we can use is an expanded polystyrene, and that's really just small beads of insulation that are heat-fused together and expanded. Second type would be an extruded polystyrene. That's a continuous closed cell that is extruded down a long line. The final one would be the polyisocyanate, or most commonly called polyiso. That is a closed face, and that can come foil-faced or not foil-faced. So, PCI does not recommend any one type. It really comes to figuring out what you have to accomplish. Each of those insulations come with different R-values. You can see at the bottom, you know, the expanded is right in that 4 to 4.5, the extruded is about a 5, and then polyiso can get as high as a 6.5, but that doesn't mean that each one is right for all applications. If you're doing something in a very hot climate, I'm thinking a room that gets very warm, you'd want to use a polyiso, which has a max operating temp of up to 250 degrees. But if you're doing something in a wet environment, you'd want to probably use an extruded, because it just does not absorb very much water. So, factoring in the R-values that are needed with the cost and with the environment that it's operating in is how you get to the right insulation. And again, I'd have you visit with your local precaster on what insulations are available in that area, and which is going to work best in your scenario. So, almost all zones require continuous insulation, according to ASHRAE 90.1, which defines it as, and I just want to, this first sentence is good, and then it just says, insulation that is continuous across all structural members without thermal bridges, without thermal bridges other than fasteners and service openings. What I like about that is that it really shows that there isn't any definition of what that means. It just says that it can't have it except for connectors and fasteners. Well, every system has a fastener, otherwise it can't stand up, right? So, what's great about precast is that in an insulated wall panel, those connections of that panel to the building happen inboard of the insulation. So, we aren't creating a thermal bridge with our connections. And then what we do on a precast panel when we're insulating it is we also use connectors that connect the two Ys together that are non-heat conducting as well. So, it's a composite material. So, we really can keep cold spots from happening for the most part in most situations. So, just taking a look at how does this come together a little bit, you know, first you determine what zone you're in, and I'm up here in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, so we sit right in about here. So, we're right on the edge of five and six. Chicago, which is where this is really being broadcast from, is zone five. So, there's tables for each zone. So, we're going to refer to the R values and non-residential construction in this presentation. So, for zone five, we'd be required to use a minimum continuous insulation of an R11.4 for a mass wall, or you can use R13 BAT insulation and a continuous insulation run of a 7.5 in a steel stud cavity. So, we'll explain here in a few slides why the difference is. First, we're going to talk a little bit about, because one thing that always comes up is, what about the joints? So, all envelope systems have joints. Natural question is, you know, how do we carry the continuous insulation across that? There's been several private studies done that specifically look at the thermal efficiency of a joint, and what they really showed is that it's negligible loss there. There are ways to insulate it and do other things there if you need to, but there really is, in that half to three-quarter inch joint, negligible loss. The next slide shows how we can carry that continuous insulation around a corner. There's really two or three different ways. These two show a butt corner on the left, where we turn the insulation inside of the precast. Then, the picture on the right just shows we do a miter corner. So, a variation, there's several variations of this, but this is really how we return that insulation and keep it continuous around a corner. Also, how you detail around with the windows. In an insulated panel in the top there, you see that the window would, for the most part, just sit right on top of our insulation band. What we'd also do is probably put in a piece of wood right here, cast in, that they can nail that down to, so they have a good nailer. Or, if you're doing a solid wall panel in the middle or at the bottom, there's a couple of different ways to do it, but it's making sure that the insulation system lines up with the window system and it all ties together. So, we'll talk a little bit just about thermal bridges and the two different types of system. In the top system, you can see it's a metal stud system with bad insulation, and then, it would have a continuous insulation on it as well. In the top right-hand picture, you can see all the different places of heat loss up there. Then, compare that to the precast system at the bottom. So, the left-hand side, you can see it's got a brick facade and some other architectural finishes on it, but in that thermal image, really, the only place that heat's being lost is through the windows and doors. I think you can even pick up a light there on the right-hand side of it. So, with that in mind, we look at the actual thermal performance of a building or of a wall, and the actual performance is based on the entire assembly, including the thermal bridging. Therefore, a steel stud wall with an R-19 bad insulation doesn't perform as an R-19 wall. It's actually closer to an R-9 due to the thermal bridging, and ASHRAE takes that into account when they apply a correction factor for the steel stud envelopes, and I'm going to click to the next slide here so you can see what we're talking about. So, if you look at that six-inch framing – so, six-inch steel studs, 24 inches on center with an R-19, you apply the correction factor at 0.45, you really have an effective R-value of 8.6. So, there's a lot of heat loss through that stud system. So, when your mechanical engineer is looking at that, they're going to want to really take into account the actual R-value that's being used there instead of the listed R-value, if you will, just to make sure they have the right loading. The other thing that precast then does for us is it takes into effect the thermal mass of the concrete. So, the concrete itself really acts like a big heat battery. So, on an insulated wall panel, where that interior white is exposed to the inside, it can collect and distribute heat as necessary, and it does it fairly slowly. So, what that does, if we look at this chart here, is it moves the peak demands off. So, on that metal wall and that wood frame wall, that peak demand is happening here, but if you look at the precast wall, it's shifted over a couple of hours. Now, up here in South Dakota, energy costs the same day and night, but there's some states in the country where energy costs are less at night because of the peak loading or peak demand, and shifting off peak can actually help save energy or save the price on the energy. The other thing it does is it dampens the effect. So, if you look at, again, the two metal wall and the wood frame wall, their peak demand is a lot more significant than it is with that precast wall. So, what that precast thermal mass system is doing is it's shifting your peak off, off the peak time, but it's also dampening its effect, so it's keeping your interior at a more constant temperature. So ASHRAE acknowledges the benefit of the mass wall, so you can kind of see as you walk through here in a region like Chicago, the maximum U factor is gonna be a 0.9, but just looking over at the R values on the right there, a mass wall needs R of 11.4 of continuous insulation, but a steel-framed wall is gonna need a 13 plus a 7.5, or a wood-framed would be 13 plus a 3.8. So that's how ASHRAE addresses that thermal mass effect. So looking at thermal performance, to calculate a material R value, we simply add up the material R value components. So in this example, the sandwich wall panel is an R value of 11.65, and that's just by adding up all of those numbers, the 0.68, the 0.6, R10 from the insulation gives you an R of 11.65, but the performance of the wall is actually greater than that when we run the thermal mass part of it. So in this performance study, what they found is the actual R value in this wall acts as a 26.10 when you take in the heat effect or the thermal mass effect, the mass wall effect. So with that, they can actually reduce the tonnage of their HVAC equipment by about 37%. So again, what you wanna do is run that scenario for the wall you're doing or for the building you're doing, and make sure that that information is fed to the mechanical group so that they can actually design the right equipment for the building that they're in. We wanna be able to take advantage of that effect. So now let's look a little bit at the moisture and the air side of it. We already talked about the heat. Now, moisture and air, again, work together. Usually they're found together. As long as you're getting the bulk water out, the rainwater out, then they really work together. And the moisture in the buildings obviously can cause a lot of problems with mold damage to the interior. When you're looking at mold specifically, it requires four things to happen. You need the fungal spores. You need oxygen. Of course, that's everywhere. You need temperatures between 40 and 70 degrees, which is what most buildings are kept at. And it needs nutrients, and that would be wood, paper, or even sheetrock. And then finally, you need moisture, and that would be any relative humidity above 70%. So there's a lot of things here we can't control. We can't control the fungal spores, the oxygen, the temperature is gonna be where it's at, and the nutrients are everywhere. So really, that just leaves us with, what can we do with the moisture? So everything we're gonna work on is trying to keep the moisture out, or at least at the right spot. So moisture gets into the buildings by one of several methods. It can get in by bulk moisture, they call it, which is just rain, or leaking roof, or bad flashing, or bad joint. Can get in with vapor diffusion. That's just a process where water vapor migrates through a wall system with the air, or migrates through the wall system and its components. It can also come in through exfiltration or infiltration, and then condensation. That's where the moisture in the air turns to condensation on the surface. So the air infiltration or exfiltration is really the movement of moist air through your facade. If I look at my house, with the siding, I have a lot of joints and a lot of different little places that air can come through or not come through, especially as you deal with the contraction and expansion. Right now it happens to be about 15 degrees out, so everything's a little contracted, so some of those air openings are gonna open up. And the great thing about looking at a wall panel is that your typical wall panel is gonna be, have a joint every 10 feet if you're doing a vertical, or every 30 feet if you're doing a horizontal. So you have a lot fewer areas for that to come through. And, excuse me, you know, the heat and the moisture will travel in and out with that air, so where do most air leaks occur? Like I said, it's, you know, 5 to 20% of it occurs at a door or the window. The rest of it's occurring through that wall. So how do you meet the continuous air barrier requirements required by IECC and the ASHRAE? Well, the good news, again, is that precast is an air barrier. It meets the section of ASHRAE code that requires no additional treatment. So it's the same as an aluminum foil vapor barrier, or extruded polystyrene does the same. But as soon as you start getting to the closed cell spray foam, or especially when you get up into the sheathings, that number raises significantly. Another nice thing with doing a precast wall is when we start to put combo finishes on it, the picture on the left has that buff brick, it has the gray stone, and it has a tan precast finish. On a facade where you're not doing that all on a precast panel, you have the interface of stone to precast, stone to brick, brick to precast. So all of those different interfaces are a chance for leakage. When you do it on a precast panel, though you have different components showing in the face, you still have a six inch or so thick solid concrete wall behind there that's acting as that vapor barrier, or air barrier. So you still have that 6,000 PSI concrete working for you. Getting into dew points a little bit, we need to understand a little bit about the dew point analysis. Most of us are familiar with the dew point from the nightly weather, or from holding a can of soda. The dew point or dew point temperature is determined by the air temperature and the humidity or wetness that's in it. That's a point where water in a gas form changes to liquid. So unlike nature, we can actually control where and when the dew point occurs in a building envelope if we carefully set our interior temperature and the humidity, kind of how it relates to the exterior. In this presentation, they talk about the air temperature and think in terms of a glass of water. Warm air holds more moisture than cold air does, hence the warmer the air, the further apart the molecules, the larger the glass that you need. When you change the air temperature, you change the size of the glass. So the relative humidity is simply the amount of moisture that is contained in the glass relative to the maximum amount of moisture that can be contained in the glass. So we'll look at a little bit of how that comes together here. So with the same temperatures, the dew point can be significantly different. If we compare this example with Des Moines and Chicago, the two cities could have a very similar temperature, but Chicago has a little lake by it, so it's going to have a lot more moisture in the air naturally. So by simply adding 20% relative humidity, you can see that there's more water, and therefore a higher dew point temperature. So that means that in Chicago, you'd have to keep the temperature above 50 degrees to avoid the dew point, whereas in Des Moines, you could actually just have to keep it above 37 degrees to keep it above the dew point. And I just love this little chart because it's kind of old school, but once you have the temperature and the relative humidity, it's really easy to find the dew point. Now there are much more sophisticated programs that can tell you this, but this chart is pretty accurate as well. But if you want to work with an insulation supplier or a precaster who can work with the insulation supplier, they have some pretty sophisticated software that can help do this and also tell where in that building facade the dew point will occur. So the main goal of all this is to design an envelope system where the dew point occurs either outside the wall or outside of the continuous insulation layer. Usually it's done by analyzing the extreme conditions where the project's located, and then compare that to the thermal analysis of the envelope. When this is done, especially in a precast wall, you create a wall where there's no cavity for moisture to collect. Any dew point that does occur can be designed to occur at the exterior width of the concrete or at least within the insulation layer, so it's not happening to the inside. That prevents any condensation. Any moisture in the outer width gets wicked out, and of course, you have to avoid the thermal bridges that we talked about, so that's where we just designed the panels to not have the thermal bridges in them. So a high-performance envelope needs to use continuous insulation, needs to reduce or eliminate the thermal bridging, it needs to use the thermal mass effect where we can, use a continuous air barrier to prevent the exfiltration or infiltration of air, use a vapor retarder or barrier to prevent moisture, and then reduce the condensation potential by controlling the dew point location and the surface temperatures. So the good news is that precast can do all of those for you. An insulated wall panel, in particular, is especially effective at doing that. It can include the continuous edge-to-edge insulation, integrally cast in, so you have the exterior width and the interior, can essentially eliminate the thermal bridging. In this particular picture, you can see the connectors. This is just one system of connecting the two faces together. Those are composite material, so you're not carrying it through, and then we'd run the connections in the back width of concrete, so we're not bridging it back to the building. It has a thermal mass, so this whole interior side of that concrete is just going to act as that heat battery we talked about earlier. It is an air barrier, it is a vapor retarder, as long as you have three inches of concrete, which we have that in the outside face and the inside face. Like I said, precast can combine all of these into one efficient system. Look real quick at just a simple case study, and this is the Opus Hall, which is a dormitory at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. It's a big, gothic, academic building, and you see there's an integration of a lot of different material looks on the outside face. It is a precast building, so that is brick and architectural finishes on there. That building took 35 days to erect. So the exterior wall system on that is a insulated wall panel system with two and a half inches of concrete on the outside, two inches of poly iso on the inside, and then another four and a half inch interior face. The non-composite design they used to eliminate any thermal bowing, they used fiber composite connectors to eliminate the thermal bridges. They used an integrated integral insulation system, which acts as an additional vapor barrier for them. There's no moisture cavity in there to collect, and it's exposed interior concrete is what they used as a finish on it. So again, they just painted that one. They did not end up doing the sheetrock on top of studs. So it's a very durable finish, and then as a bonus, they looked at it with a four plus hour fire rating, plus also sound transmission class rating of 54. So it really helps to keep the traffic noise and exterior noise outside. So here's the interior walls. This would be the exterior wall of their dorm room, and that's just a painted precast system. Same with this wall system here. So again, they didn't fur this out and add any additional materials on the inside. So here's a look at the dew point analysis on this job in particular. You can see that the dew point temperature and the actual temperature never intersect. The actual temperature is the red line, and the blue line is the dew point temperature. Hence, the dew point doesn't occur within the wall or on the interior face. So there's not a condensation problem happening on this building, and again, you can work with the precaster or the insulation providers, and they can help run these analysis. Here's a thermal imaging of the outside of that building, and what I can find is it looks like five people standing out front looking at it, and then you can see where the lights are and some windows were left open is what you really see in there. So there's very little to no thermal bridging in that building at all. The cold points or cold or hot points are where they left the windows open or people are standing or the lights are. So it's a very efficient system. The other thing we wanted to talk about then today is just the resiliency and the safety of precast. So not only is it really good at looking good and keeping water out and controlling moisture and air, but it also really stands out as a resilient material and helps keep the occupants inside safe. So when we start talking about resiliency and safety, we're looking at, you know, it's a long service life, a lot of precast systems that now are being designed with a lifespan of 100 years or more. There aren't VOCs in it, so it's really good for the indoor air quality, doesn't provide any food source for mold, and of course it's fire resistant as well. You know, all of that helps keep the people inside healthy and safe. You know, there is another aspect to high-performance design called resiliency, or sometimes we call it functional resiliency. Basically it's an extension of sustainability and refers to a structure's ability to resist and withstand extreme natural or man-made events, you know, like an earthquake or hurricane explosion, kind of those things we're hearing in the news every day today. It also includes how quickly a structure can be returned to service after one of those events, and precast inherently provides a high level of resiliency. So to illustrate this, I have three videos that I'm going to show, and I'll just apologize in advance because the sound isn't coming through on it, so you're going to have to listen to my narration on it instead. The first one is an impact test. So what they did on the impact test is they took an air cannon and loaded a 2x4 into it and shot it at several different wall systems. So the first wall system they shot it at would be just a wood stud system with an exterior siding of some sort, like a lap siding you find on a house. The second system that they shot it into is a steel stud system with a brick facade on it. Actually, I'm sorry, that's a wood frame system with a brick facade on it. That's what it was on a steel frame brick. And the final one is on the precast wall panel. So as it runs a little bit in the background, I'll just say a little bit more about it. You can see that in the other systems that 2x4 penetrates in some cases really without slowing down. But when it hits that precast panel, and that precast panel is a 2-2-2 panel, so it's two inches of concrete, two inches of insulation, two inches of concrete. I don't know that it even scratched the precast. So I'm going to jump off that slide and we're going to look at the next one. And the next slide is going to talk about how it performs in explosion testing. See if I can get this to work for me here. So this is something that PCI did in conjunction with the Air Force. And they really wanted to look at how do we update codes and designs to really give us explosion resistance. Where they were at before is they just really had to have a standoff of a lot of distance because they weren't sure how to control that explosive force. So like I said, PCI paired up with the Air Force Research Laboratory and went through a series of tests. They built some precast walls, they put some explosions out by it and measured what happened to it. And then we've taken that data since then and started rewriting the codes and rewriting how precast is built so that it can perform and basically withstand those events. And if you look in that explosion one, in some of these pictures, you see that there's a couple significant forces that happen. The first is the explosive force, so the gases expand away and push in on that precast. But then as it contracts, it also creates a suction force. So what they learned through those tests is how to develop connections and panels that withstand both of those forces. I'm going to let it play here for just another minute here real quick. Let me see if I can get back up. There we go. So you can see how it goes in first and then rebounds back out. So both forces are significant and have to be considered in the system. Then I'm going to jump to the last one. And the last one is a seismic event they were looking at. And what they did on this one is they tested it three different ways. The first test that they ran, I'm going to just jump ahead here, let it play from up in this range. But what they did first is they looked at it in a seismic zone over on the East Coast. I think it was North Carolina where they looked at it first. So the first test is a pretty minor seismic event. There's a little bit of shake, but not a lot. Then they kept ramping that up and looking at what it would look like in a potential seismic event up in Seattle. And then finally, what would it look like in a potential earthquake in the Berkeley area. And then the last test that they ran, and we'll get to that one here when it's done running. The last test they ran is what that seismic event would look like kind of at a max expected seismic event. So I'm going to jump through a little bit of this talking. Yeah, I can see there's quite a crowd on hand for this little demonstration. So we'll watch the first, watch it here for a little bit as they show the structure. And what it is, it's a reduced model, size model of a precast structure. So they have the precast columns, precast beams, and then they used double Ts and holocore for the diaphragm. And you can see also in the end there's that shear wall that we see there. So those hydraulic ramps, what they did to actuate it. So this would be the first attempt, and that was, I think it was Raleigh, North Carolina, like I said. So the structure easily performs through that. I'm going to jump ahead to one of the more significant ones here. So now they're starting to throw a little bit of energy into that. Still the building performed very well through that cycle. I'm going to jump ahead here again and watch some of that little bit more significant event here, if this thing keeps playing for me. So on this last one, they actually moved in some steel frames on each side of that building. We'll see them when they get back to the overall picture. And they built those just in case there was a catastrophic failure of the system, that the whole thing wouldn't just come tumbling down. So they wanted the area to be more secure and not smash everything if something crazy happened. So like I said, so they're showing, they designed this to be on the max event on the fault line there. So there you can see the steel frame structure they built on the outside again, just to make sure that things didn't get out of control while they're testing. So it's really kind of crazy how much that building moves and racks, but it stays standing. And again, if my sound is working accurately today, the last words they say is, and it's still standing, they sound a lot more dramatic than I do. But what you can see there is that precast can be very resilient in that you can undergo a lot of force and a lot of potentially catastrophic events and still be structurally standing. So if one of these events were to happen, obviously we'd have to inspect the building and make sure everything's okay. But at the end of the day, these buildings stood. And so it's a really good way to protect the occupants of the building. So kind of wrap it up in a summary. High performance structures are those that integrate and optimize all the relevant attributes, not just one or two of them. We shouldn't be leaving things like thermal mass optimization on the table. They're going to focus on long-term performance, not just first cost. And they're built not only sustainably, but resiliently. High performance materials are those that are versatile, efficient, and resilient, and provide a long-term performance. So high performance precast provides continuous air and moisture vapor barriers, continuous insulation. It's one of the fastest building systems in that, again, we can put a lot of panels up in a very short amount of time, which really gets your building enclosed quickly. And then it doesn't have some of the negative effects that you can deal with the moisture and VOCs and some of those other issues. Provides an excellent aesthetic versatility. Like I said before, there's really not much we can't do with precast. I did miss the resilient side. So we showed those three videos talking about that multi-hazard protection. And then the other one that I think is just really cool is it's very adaptable for use and reuse. So often we build a building for a purpose today, and then tomorrow we need it to be something else. And using a precast structure can really help change those over easily. So that is what I had today. So I think we might have time for a question or two here also. So with that, I will turn it back over.

high-performance building envelopes

precast

sustainability

durability

insulated wall panels

thermal performance

moisture management

resiliency benefits