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How fib COM6 can Elevate Your Practice & Professio ...
fib Webinar Dec24
fib Webinar Dec24
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Good afternoon. Welcome to PCI's webinar series. Today's presentation is Unlocking Opportunities in Precast Concrete, How FIBCOM6 Can Elevate Your Practice and Professional Growth. My name is Nicole Clow, Marketing Manager at PCI, and I will be your moderator for this session. Before I turn the controls over to your presenters for today, I have a few introductory items to note. Earlier today, we sent a reminder email to all registered attendees. The email contained a webinar attendance sign-in sheet, a guide to downloading your Certificate of Continuing Education, and a PDF of today's presentation. The handouts are also available now and can be found in the handout section located near the bottom of your GoToWebinar toolbox. If there are multiple listeners at your location, please circulate the attendance sheet and send the completed sign-in sheet back to PCI per the instructions on the form. The attendance sheet is only for use at locations with multiple listeners on the line. If you are the only person at your location, there is no need to complete an attendance sheet, as we already have your information from registration. If you cannot download any of the handouts, please email PCI Marketing at marketing at pci.org as shown on your screen. Please 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 to read to the presenters 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. PCI has met the standards and requirements of the Registered Continuing Education Program, RCEP. We can offer one PDH for this presentation. Credit earned on completion of this program will be reported to RCEP.net. A Certificate of Completion will be issued to each participant. As such, it does not include content that may be deemed or construed to be an approval or endorsement by RCEP. With hundreds of attendees for our webinars, it is impractical to prepare individual certificates. As PCI has met the standards and requirements of RCEP, you will upload attendance data to www.rcep.net within 10 days, and you can print your Certificates of Continuing Education. Your login name at www.rcep.net is your email address, so please do not leave that blank if you are completing the sign-in sheet. We need your email address to get your certificate for this course. AIA credit is not being offered for this presentation. Learning objectives for this webinar include gaining a clear understanding of COM 6 prefabrication and its objectives within FIB, exploring the latest publications and outputs from COM 6's task groups covering topics like sustainability, quality control, and structural innovation, learning how to access COM 6 resources for practical use in their projects and research, recognizing the potential career and organizational benefits of participating in FIB's task groups and commissions, and understanding how PCI and FIB collaborate, enhancing opportunities for knowledge exchange and the development of international best practices in precast concrete. Our presenters for today are Ned Cleland. With over 50 years of professional experience, Dr. Ned Cleland is a distinguished expert in precast and prestressed concrete design, detailing, and construction. Dr. Cleland has led advancements in earthquake-resistant design for precast, prestressed concrete structures, and co-authored the first and second editions of the PCI Seismic Design Manual with Dr. S.K. Ghosh. Currently, he chairs the PCI Design Standard Committee, where he collaborates with ACI to develop the ACI PCI 319, a new design standard for precast, prestressed concrete structures. Dr. Cleland's extensive experience and contributions to PCI make him a key figure in bridging best practices across international and American standards in precast concrete. Joining Ned is Steph Maas, a structural engineer from Belgium with 30 years of experience in both structural and non-structural precast concrete. He currently serves as the chair of FIB Commission 6 on prefabrication and is the co-chair of the task group on precast floors and floors for precast structures. Additionally, Steph chairs CNTC 229 WG1, the body responsible for developing European standards for structural precast concrete. Since 2012, Steph has been with FIB, the Belgian Precast Association, where he currently holds the position of CEO. His work spans numerous national and international commissions and working groups focused on standardization, certification, and the promotion of precast concrete. I will now hand the controls over to the presenters so we can begin our presentation. Thank you. This is Ned, and I would really like to offer my appreciation for those of you who are attending to listen to this presentation today. FIB is the international group that you will learn more about in the seminar. I have been a member for a number of years, and there are a number of other PCI members who have also participated. This is an opportunity that we have to provide the PCI membership in the United States and exposure to the opportunities and the resources that are available through PCI's cooperative agreement with FIB to get an international perspective and understanding of precast concrete construction, not just from our country, but from all over the world. This is a country-centric related perspective from our experience in the United States, but from an international perspective that gives us an idea of how precast concrete may be expanded and used in greater ways than we have even begun to perceive. For this, I'm going to turn the presentation over to Steph Moss in order to give you an introduction into FIB and into some of the commission task groups. I will talk about some of the task groups that I participate in later in the presentation, and I hope that you take away a good opportunity and a good resource for improving the way that you can provide precast concrete in your practice or in your profession. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Cleland. This is Steph Moss speaking, and I have the pleasure to introduce you to the work of FIB, the International Federation for Structural Concrete, or in French, the Fédération Internationale du Béton. So let's start with the history of FIB. FIB has been created in 1998. It was not a new organization. We had already two international organizations. One was called FIB. It was also a French acronym. It was the International Federation for Pre-Stressing, la Fédération Internationale de la Précontrainte. It was created in 1952. And another organization, also a French acronym, Comité Euro-International du Béton, or the Euro-International Committee for Concrete, which has been founded in 1953. So the two were merged together into one bigger organization called FIB. And if you look on the right-hand side of your screen, you see the FIB logo. Below the logo, you still see the two words CEP and FIB. Today, FIB has 42 statutory member countries. And you see the full list on your left-hand side. It covers quite well all activities in the world. 42 is quite a good number. And you see below on your left-hand side that the United States is one of these members. The United States has four national members. The biggest one is PCI. And that fits quite well with the activities of Commission 6. I'll come later to the activities of that commission. But since the focus of PCI is on precast, pre-stressed concrete, and Commission 6 has exactly the same scope, we work quite well together in this commission. As I said, the states have four national members, PCI, also the American Segmental Bridge Institute, the Post-Tensioning Institute, and the Federal Highway Association. So PCI is a national, a so-called national member group. These 42 members, they cover 104 countries. We have in total 104 engineers or people that are working with FIB, and they cover 104 countries. What is the mission and what are the objectives of the FIB? First of all, to develop at an international level the study of scientific and practical methods capable of advancing the technical, economic, aesthetic, and environmental performance of concrete construction. So that means we work about the stimulation of research and the synthesis of findings. We transfer these findings into design and construction practice. Then we work quite hard on the dissemination by creating publications, conferences, etc. And we produce recommendations and codes which we disseminate again to our members. This is the structure of FIB. As every big organization, there is a General Assembly. It is the parliament of the organization. And next to this General Assembly, we have a Technical Council. These are all people that are really experts in all the topics that are related with concrete as such. FIB is not about pre-concrete, it is about concrete as such. The parliament also has a Presidium. The Presidium are the people that are in charge of the functioning of FIB, and they are assisted by a secretariat. But all the work that leads to the publication of documents is done within the commissions. And in general, we have four big groups that are dealing with different topics. We have a first group of commissions that are talking about or dealing about planning and execution. A second group is dealing with materials and production. A third group with sustainability and durability. And a fourth group with education and publications. And beside these four groups, we have also a young member group. I will talk a bit about these groups on the next couple of slides. Here you see the members of the Presidium of FIB. You will recognize Larbi Senner on your right-hand side. He is representing PCI. He is also the head of delegation. This is the Presidium as it was in 2023 and 2024. The deputy president that you see on your left-hand side, Iria Donyak. She will become the president of FIB during the next two years. Now let's talk about some publications. FIB, like any big organization, has its own journal. And it's called the Journal of FIB, also called Structural Concrete. In this magazine, you will find a lot of information that is related to concrete and precast concrete. It is a journal that is only published in a digital way these days. It has an impact factor of 3.2. That means that every article is, as an average, cited 3.2 times or was cited 3.2 times in the last two years. We have six issues per year starting from 2016. And in 2022, we had about 3,800 pages or 300 papers that were published in Structural Concrete. Structural Concrete is one of the best ways to be informed about all the research that's going on in the world that is related to concrete and precast concrete. If you are a member of FIB, you have access to Structural Concrete. You can read the full document online. On these slides, I have always put the path on the right-hand side of the slide. So you will find on the right-hand side the website of FIB. It's www.fibinternational.org. Then you can go to the section Publications. And under that section Publications, you will find SE Journal for Members or Structural Concrete Journal for Members. So if you are a member, you can find all this information. But you can also go to the Wiley online library where you can download exactly the same documents. We have PDF articles since 2011. So this is a huge library and a lot of information that is related to precast concrete. A second type of documents that we have are bulletins. Bulletins, they gather all the results of the commissions and the task groups that we have within FIB. We have different types of bulletins. We have so-called technical reports. We have state-of-the-art reports, textbooks, manuals, guides, recommendations, and so on. And since a couple of years, we also have a digital object identifier per bulletin and per chapter, at least if we have main authors for each bulletin or each chapter. And the bulletins, they are indexed in the Scopus database, which is quite important for academics amongst us. So these bulletins, they are not published as much or as regularly as structural concrete, but here you find all the work that has been done by our task groups. On the website, you can always find the abstracts of the bulletins. So if you are interested in a topic that has been dealt with in a bulletin and before you would like to buy a bulletin, you would like to know what is the bulletin all about, then you can download the abstract. If you are not a member yet, you can buy the bulletin on the FIB web store. But if you are a FIB member, then you will receive a discount. And depending on the type of membership you are, the plan in which you are, you can preview the FIB bulletin, or you can also receive a printed copy of the FIB bulletin. All FIB bulletins, they are included in Google Docs. So on your right hand side, again, you see the website of FIB. You go down to publications and then you can find all the FIB bulletins and read the abstracts of these bulletins. A third type of document is the model code. Since 1978, CEB and FIB, they already published model codes. And a couple of months ago, we published the 2020 model code. It's a bit strange if I say a couple of months ago. We are already 24, but it's still called the 2020 model code. And in daily practice, the model code serves as a kind of science-based guidance for people that draft other technical documents. For instance, in Europe, when we were drafting the Eurocode, quite a lot of articles in the Eurocode, they were based on articles that were published in the model code. Here goes something wrong. I do apologize. The model code 2020 cannot be downloaded as a PDF file, although you can buy it and you can get a printed version of the model code or you can also consult it with the web viewer. The fact if you can consult it on the web viewer or not is again depending on the level of subscription. But there are special plans available. For instance, you can get until the end of the year a 50% discount on the purchase of the FIB model code and you can get access also with a 50% discount to the online viewer. So in that way, even for a cheap price, you can have a very good idea about what is going on in this model code and even consult the full model code. FIB also is active on social media. First of all, there is a newsletter. You can subscribe even today to that newsletter. You will receive the newsletter and you can follow what is going on within FIB. And as Dr. Cleland just explained, there is a lot going on. So it's always good to see what's going on in the world and not always to look as we quite often do to our own work and our own experience. Concrete is a beautiful material and there is still a lot to be discovered. So I can only advise you to register for the FIB newsletter. You can also read the newsletter with a viewer or you can also subscribe to the e-newsletter. So as you are maybe today not yet a member of FIB, you can already subscribe to this e-newsletter. On your right hand side, you find again the path to the right place on the website to register. There is a very good YouTube channel. If you can't sleep tonight, I can only advise you, go to this YouTube channel and discover all the videos. I think today, no, I don't think, I'm sure today there are 234 videos dealing with different topics related to concrete and to precast concrete. And once you start looking at them, it is such a great source of information, you can't stop anymore. So take your time to have a look at these videos. And if you have questions about topics, don't hesitate to contact somebody from PCI or to contact me to get more information. This is really a very good source of information. You can also FIB on other social media like LinkedIn, the YouTube channel, Facebook, Instagram and on a regular basis, a lot of information is spread through these channels. Last but not least, we also have a young members group. It is quite important to have young engineers involved in the work of FIB. And as you can see on this slide, there are a lot of objectives that are quite important. We would like to improve the way that these young engineers work in our society and our group, that they work with other engineers. We would like to encourage people to mentor with the FIB. We would like them to study the work of other engineers and to improve their own work. But it's also very important to network and to establish connections, not only with universities, but also with other engineers. And we would like to encourage junior engineers to help engineering students. They organize workshops, they organize a lot of activities, and they also promote the idea that junior engineers can participate in meetings and conferences and be a source of knowledge for students. So this is really a very nice group. And it's also a very promising group for the near future. So if you are a young engineer, don't hesitate, go to this section of the website to learn more about the young members group and discover how you can be involved in the work of FIB. FIB also has a couple of events. You will find the same event every three or four years. This is the list of the upcoming events. Next year, we have a symposium on conceptual design in Rio de Janeiro, and also the FIB symposium in Antibes. I mentioned 2026, the congress in Lisbon, but all the other events, I leave it up to you to discover them. Please have a regular look on our website to discover about these events and feel free to participate. It's still a very far away, but in 2029, we will organize the FIB symposium in the States. Now I would like to take you to Commission 6. Commission 6, it's a bit more comfortable to talk about, because this is where Dr. Gleason and I, we are very active. I have the pleasure to be the chairman of this group. I was the chairman of that group for the last eight years. And next year, I will hand over the chairmanship to the next chairman of Commission 6, and also he will chair for eight years. So this is a normal term. One term takes four years. This is the group of the members. I don't go with you through the full group. I only want to point on the people that you see in green, Dr. Cleland, Tom Darcy, Dean Frank, Jason Kroon, and Larbi Senner. They work on behalf of PCI in this group, and we have a very good and a very close cooperation in this group. As I said before, I have the pleasure to be the chair. Witt Rachkowski is the deputy chair, and he will become the next chair of the group. Larbi Senner is also a vice chair, or a deputy chair of this group, and Alessandra Ronchetti, she is the secretary of this group. Since 2008, May 22, 2008, we have this close cooperation with PCI, and for Commission 6, this is really important, because I think we all have the same problem. If you work with a lot of friends all around Europe, then you always have the impression that your way of doing is the only way of doing, which is, of course, not true. By having cooperation with other countries, with other institutes, we discover all the ways of dealing with concrete. Totally different. It's not about good or wrong. It's just inspiring to see how other people are dealing with precast concrete in a different way, and we still discover new things after so many years. We have a lot of cooperations all over the world, but the cooperation with PCI is a very special cooperation, and I really would like to take this opportunity to thank all the members from the states that are working in Commission 6 for their friendship in the first place, but also for the good work that they do. Since 2008, Commission 6 has been a very active task group. Since 2008, we have already had a couple of co-authored publications, but also a couple of jointly written articles. The Commission 6 is the commission where we are supposed to organize the work of the task groups, and this is the list of task groups that are today active within Commission 6. You could say it's a long task group, a long list, but we think that all these points, they are quite important if you talk about modern precast technology today. One of the oldest group is the one dealing with precast floors. In the past, it was the pre-stressed hollow core group, but we changed the title and we broadened the scope. We have a group about quality control, a group about sustainability. I think every commission should talk about sustainability these days. We have a group about precast concrete towers for wind power generators. We have a group about precast bridges. We have a group about seismic assessment and retrofit of precast concrete buildings. A group about precast toll buildings. A group about terminology, a very special group. I'll come back to that later on. We have a group about precast parking structures, a group about social challenges, and a group, a very new group on precast concrete modular buildings. In the next couple of minutes, I will take you through all these groups. This is an overview of the publications that were produced within our commission, Commission 6. It's a very nice list. You will notice, I will highlight these bulletins right now. You will notice that starting from bulletin 78, all our bulletins were joint publications. That means that the content of the bulletin was made together with our PCI friends and also that PCI did a tech review. I don't know if I used the right word, but I think it is called a tech review. They also approved the content. In this way, the content of the bulletin is a content that is supported and by PCI and by FIB. From that point of view, it's very nice to push this information that is supported by two huge organizations inside the full world and to disseminate knowledge in this way. Allow me to start with Task Group 6.1. Task Group 6.1, as I said before, is dealing with precast floors and precast structures. We already had two publications about precast, pre-stressed holocaust floors in 1988, and then we had an update in 2000. I think many of you know already about this bulletin 6. I think in many parts of the world, it's still a sound base for the calculation of a pre-stressed holocaust floors. Published in 2000, a lot changed since 2000. There was a lot of good research that was conducted since 2002. Maybe you know about the Holkator project. It was a project that was dealing with torsion and shear in the holocaust. But due to the fire in Rotterdam, where there was a lot of negative messages about holocaust floors and the fire, there was also a research conducted that was called Hulk of Fire. These three searches, they brought a lot of information to us. We were obliged, we felt obliged to bring all this new insight and a new bulletin. This bulletin, which is taking over the outcome of the research, but also the experiences of our task group members, this bulletin will be published in 2025. The bulletin already is provided, the background is providing the background for the European product standard on pre-stressed holocaust slabs. I will not take you through the full bulletin, but on this slide, you have an overview. At least you have an idea about the type of information, the kind of information that will be available in this bulletin. I start directly with chapter three. We should tell people how to design the cross-section of a holocaust. It all starts with the cross-section of the holocaust. In chapter four, we will tell how you could design the floor that is made out of holocaust floors. We explain how you can use holocaust floors in seismic regions. Sometimes you hear people saying it's impossible to build a pre-stressed holocaust floor in a seismic area. We don't think it's true, but you should take the right measures. We talk about building physics. We talk about sustainability aspects. As I said before, you cannot publish a bulletin these days without considering sustainability aspects. We look at some design considerations that are related to the manufacture of the holocaust slabs. We also look to the finished element as such. Then, of course, there is a long list with references and literature. I take you to one of the chapters, chapter 3.5. As you saw in a previous slide, this is about the design of the cross-section. This chapter deals, for instance, with the ultimate limit state of the holocaust slab. Then you see chapters like flexural capacity, anchorage, and shear capacity. This is what you know from many publications. What was introduced due to the Holcotech research, and you see some images on your right-hand side, that is the shear bending interaction. We look at the torsion capacity, and then we also look to the shear and torsion interaction. It's mainly that part that comes from the Holcotech investigation. Then we give some other design considerations. Sometimes, in this presentation, you will see a QR code. If you scan that QR code, you will enter a website where you can find much more information about the topic. Sometimes, it's just the background document that was relevant to us to draft the bulletin. Feel free to scan and to save the link on your phone. When I go to task group 6.2, you see a lot of cubes. If you see a lot of cubes, we think about quality control. This group is making a bulletin about quality control for precast concrete. In the States, as in Europe, as in many other countries, we have a very high level of quality control. This is something that we built, I would say, the last five decades, and this is really good. Concrete is used all over the world. After all, concrete is the most used material all over the world. You can imagine that there are still countries where people struggle with good quality control. We started working. By the way, it was an initiative, I think, from Dean Frank at that time. At that time, he was working for PCI. It was his initiative to draft a bulletin about quality control. We will explain to people how to deal with a quality control system, what type of operations should you do, how do you deal with materials, accessories, how do you deal with equipment, how to deal with the production process, how to deal with the finished products, and how to deal with transport and assembly. We will not talk at this point about quality control issues that are related to the design. This is really only the part that is done in the factory, starting from the shop drawings that are available to the moment that the elements are delivered on the construction site. The next task group is 6.3. It's dealing with sustainability for structures with precast elements. Today, we all talk about sustainability, but for FIP in general and for Commission 6, sustainability was always a key focus in our work. You can see that we already published bulletins about environmental issues and prefabrication in 2003, in general, effects of concrete in 2003, and LCA life cycle assessment in 2013. Today, we work about two additional bulletins. One bulletin was finished a couple of years ago. It is bulletin 88, and that is a state-of-the-art report. There, you will find a lot of information dealing with environmental aspects, social aspects, and economic aspects, but also you will find information and methodology to assess precast structures. The most interesting thing, at least from my point of view, are the case studies at the end. It makes no sense to talk or to give a philosophy about the sustainability aspects of precast structures if you don't bring the audience to some case studies where you show how you could deal with the offered set of precast structures. This is exactly what we have done in bulletin 88. Only a couple of weeks ago, we approved a new bulletin, and this is, again, a technical report. It has no number yet because it is not printed yet, and it's called Sustainability of Structures with Precast Elements Assessment Using a Multicriterial Decision-Making Tool. In this bulletin, we explain the methodology of this multicriterial decision-making tool, and again, we offer case studies that show you how you can evaluate the sustainability of precast structures by using this tool. Bulletin 6.4, it's about wind turbines or precast concrete towers for wind power generators. We are really talking about the vertical element of these wind power generators. So we are really talking about the vertical element of these wind power generators, the towers, as we say. We have a good reason to do that. This graph shows you the proportion of concrete towers relative to the total number of wind towers built. Then you see that the number of precast concrete towers is increasing rapidly. So this is really the right moment to bring information to the market about the way how to deal with precast concrete towers. The bulletin will be a state-of-the-art report. In this report, of course, there's an introduction, and then we will explain how could you make – what are the different types of precast concrete towers for these wind power or wind turbine generators. It's not only the tower that can be made out of concrete or precast concrete. We could also make the precast foundations – or we could make precast foundations. We talk about certification. Certification is quite important in this industry. We will explain the basis of the design, the principles of the design. We will discuss the loads that are applied in the design, the different types of verifications, the prefabrication as such, how do we deal with these elements, the handling, the storage, the transport, the assembly, inspection and monitoring, and as I said before, no bulletin without a chapter about sustainability. We also deal with sustainability. This is a really nice group of experts from all over the world. We hope the bulletin will be ready somewhere next year. We are really convinced that this bulletin can inspire a lot of people that are dealing with the construction of precast concrete towers for wind power generators. I would like to tell you more about the bridges, but why should I do? Because Dr. Cleland, he is, I think, a member of this – no, I will still – if you agree, Dr. Cleland, I will still deal with the bridges and I will hand it over to you. In 6.5, we talk about bridges. This is a very productive group. The group has already published many years ago a first document about precast concrete bridges. They published bulletin 94, that was a bulletin that was dealing with continuity of bridges only, only this aspect, and as you can see, it was a joint FIB-PCI publication. Then they published a next bulletin, it is bulletin 99 about conceptual design, and we approved only a couple of weeks ago a third bulletin about lateral stability. The group is still not planning to stop the work. They already announced that they will work on an additional bulletin, and that is a bulletin about ultra-high performance concrete in precast bridges. Just to inspire you, on the left-hand side you see the bulletin about conceptual design of precast concrete bridge structures. On the right-hand side, you see some pictures from the bulletin, and if you look at the map in the middle of your screen, you see where the members of that task group are located. I think when I mention the name of Maarten Tadros, this name really rings a bell in the States, doesn't it? Again, in this bulletin, a lot of examples. We have 28 bridges in this bulletin, so if you are into bridge design, I can only recommend you to have a look at bulletin 99 and to see how conceptual design was applied in these 28 examples. So, Dr. Klienhout, I think this is your task group, so I get the word. Yes. Okay, so I will pick up to talk about task group 6.6. This is Seismic Assessment and Retrofit of Precast Concrete Structures. I've participated on this. Stefano Pompanen is the chair of this task group, and it's very important for precast because, as with a lot of structural concrete development, we've learned more and more about seismic design, and we look back and find that there are precast concrete structures that may not have performed well. I toured Turkey in 1999 after the earthquake, Chile in 2010 after the earthquake. We find things performing or did not perform as we had hoped, so now we're looking back at what can we do, how did we build things, and how do we correct them economically? So, this task group is working on a state-of-the-art report on the historical development of the characteristics of precast concrete, the damage observations of typical vulnerabilities, simplified assessment methodologies, and retrofit strategies. There's a cost-benefit comparison going on. This is also a bulletin that is nearing completion, probably will be completed in the middle of 2025. I think it will be a valuable tool, and it's been a great cooperation of understanding for the issues that have occurred across the world. We don't get earthquakes as a laboratory very often, so it's really important here to look around the world for our total global experience in order to provide solutions to these problems. Task group 6.7, Precast Concrete in Tall Buildings. I also participated in this. I think this is one of the most outstanding reports or bulletins that's been produced by FID in terms of providing information to United States practice that we may not have considered. We've been talking about total precast for so many years, but we really haven't pushed the envelope in the U.S. about going tall with our buildings with a few notable examples that we have that are in our history and in seismic design in San Francisco. But in terms of regular production, in this bulletin, it covers many things about the engineering, about the concrete structural systems, and the issues with the floor cells and stairs. It also considers external facade and cladding and precast concrete in seismic zones. But here the case studies are the most valuable part because they give us a way to actually see what has been done. We've seen projects that have remarkable approach to construction methodology. How do you go up 30 stories with an economical assembly of precast concrete that is both safe and effective and competitive? These are buildings that are not put up by designers who are just thinking I want to do precast, but by constructors who are finding that precast concrete is the best way to solve their problems for creating office buildings and high-rise apartments that we typically haven't embraced in the United States. This is a great resource for covering that material. The terminology task group is essential for an international organization. We all tend to talk about precast concrete, but we don't always use the same words. We don't use the same terminology. And the group which Jason Crone has been working on provides a way to give us a common terminology so that when we're talking about precast concrete, we're talking with a common language. The task group 6.9 is a task group that's been in operation for a few years after the COVID pandemic. It kind of became a little bit morbid, but it's revitalized in looking forward of getting different ways that parking is handled across the world. There are different approaches. There are different expectations in different parts of the world. Much of the parking garage work that's done in Europe is done with hollow core. We rarely use hollow core in the United States, but getting a perspective and why that's happened that way is very important. But also beyond the variety of precast concrete, it's the things that are coming. What are we going to do with electric cars? What are we doing with automated vehicles? And what are we doing with the changes in demand for parking in our city areas, our city central, where people are resistant to having additional traffic? What about adaptability of parking garages to new functions? If the culture transfers away from individual vehicles, how do we do an adaptation? This is a task that is working on how do we develop the future. Task group 6.11, dealing with social challenges, is one that is just beginning to look at beyond the engineering and into the social aspects. At this point, Steph, I think I will turn this back to you as you're working on this group and you can carry on from that point. Yes, thank you. In our daily life, we always look to the impact of concrete from an LCA point of view. We thought it's also important to look to concrete from an SLCA point of view, it's a social life cycle analysis. This is quite interesting, especially when you are dealing with the promotion of concrete and precast concrete. We should look much further than only the very excellent behaviour of concrete when it comes to mechanical properties, when it comes to robustness, when it comes to a lot of properties that we consider being an engineer. There is more than only that. We should also have a look about the social impact of our industry, the social impact of our factories. What are we doing to society? What is good, but also what is bad? This is a very new exercise for our commission. It's going, I speak for myself, far out of my comfort zone, but it obliges us to really have a clear view on the impact of concrete and especially of our concrete precast concrete industry, the impact on our society. We just started this work. We are now looking for stakeholder engagement. We hope that in one year, maybe two years, we will be able to develop recommendations that we can give guidance to people to minimise the negative impact, but also to maximise the positive social outcomes of this work. If you're really dealing with the promotion of precast concrete, and I can imagine that this is quite important in today's world where people only look at CO2 impact and they forget about a lot of other things. If you're dealing with this discussion, I can only recommend you to follow the work of this group. A brand new group is task group 6.12. It's about precast concrete modular buildings. We all have a lot of experience with the module as such, a wall, an element, a beam, whatever, a staircase and so on, but there are many different ways to deal with modularity. In this group, this new group, we will have a look to all the requirements for precast concrete modular buildings. We will see what kind of structural systems we can offer to the market. We are going to give an overview of all the different types of elements that we have, but we will also talk about elements such as the stabilising core of a structure, how to deal with that in a modular way, what is the impact of modularity on connections, how to deal with behaviour as such, I mean, to the seismic areas, what about fire resistance, and as Dr Cleland said in the previous publications, again, a lot of case studies that gather all the experience from all over the world, and the idea is that with US examples, we inspire people in Europe, in Brazil, in Japan, wherever, and with our examples, we hope that we can inspire people in the States. This way of working together is really inspiring everyone who is active in the group or who is following the work of the group. So this gives you an overview of the work that is done in the different task groups, and as I said before, the outcome of the work in our task groups is always published in a bulletin, and the bulletin is only available to, no, it's not fully correct, the bulletin is on a discount rate available for the members of FIB, but everyone can go to the FIB website, to the webshop of FIB, and just buy the bulletin. But we do more than that. Whenever we use, we organise a meeting of our commission, normally we start a meeting on a Thursday afternoon and we have meetings until Saturday evening, we try to use the opportunity to organise mini seminars. On your right hand side, you see a flyer from our seminar in Istanbul, it was in 2019, and you might recognise somebody on this slide. Since we have a lot of experts that are working in our task groups, that are doing a lot of good work, and since they need to travel anyhow to another country each time to have this meeting, it is an excellent opportunity to ask them to make presentations and to bring their experience to the local engineers, to local students and so on. So on your left hand side, you see a couple of seminars that we have organised within Commission 6, a very nice way to bring our insights to the outside world, but also a very good moment to have discussions with people that are using precast concrete, that are dealing with problems, that bring the problems to us, and it's then up to us to find solutions for these problems. Good, I think we are more or less at the end of this presentation. I would like to end with a quote from one of our members in the Commission 6, it's Stefano Pampanen from the University of Rome. He said once, Commission 6, it's a group of friends that just uses precast concrete as an argument, as an excuse to meet each other, and I think that says quite well what we are doing. All people within Commission 6 are quite passionate about precast concrete, they love to bring their knowledge together, they work really hard on making good bulletins, and I'm really happy that today you came to this webinar to listen to Dr. Cleland and me, and I hope that I could show you that there's a lot going on in the Commission 6. I would like to encourage you to have a look at the FIB website, to go to the member section, you will be surprised how cheap it is to become a member of FIB and to have an open gate to all this information. Dr. Cleland, if you agree, I leave it up to you to close the seminar. Yeah, this has been a great opportunity for us to share our experience, for the knowledge that we gain from FIB, the friendships, the understanding, the networking is invaluable. The group is well in cooperation with PCI. It merits your consideration, it merits your understanding and your knowledge about where to find additional information. I can go on. The model code has things that we haven't gotten into our ACI code or our new ACI PCI 319. Invaluable resources that we can use every day about what we're doing with the design of precast and prestressed concrete. It is such a great resource, and I really appreciate those who've taken the time and taken the opportunity to hear about what may be available to you, and I hope that you will consider membership, participation, but certainly paying attention and knowing that the material is there, and thank you very much for attending. Wonderful. So, on behalf of PCI, I'd like to thank Dr. Ned Cleland and Steph Moss for a great presentation. Unfortunately, it does not look like we have enough time for questions today, but all questions will be forwarded to the presenters along with your contact information. As a reminder, certificates of continuing education will appear in your account at www.rcep.net within 10 days. If you have any further questions about today's webinar, please email marketing at pci.org. Thank you again and have a great day and stay safe.
Video Summary
The PCI webinar, "Unlocking Opportunities in Precast Concrete," hosted by Nicole Clow, highlighted the significance of FIB Commission 6 (FIBCOM6) in advancing precast concrete practices. Presenters Dr. Ned Cleland and Steph Moss shared extensive insights into FIB's initiatives, emphasizing their role in enhancing both technical knowledge and professional growth. They discussed various task groups focused on areas such as precast floors, quality control, sustainability, wind power concrete towers, seismic retrofitting, and more. The seminar underscored the importance of international collaboration, offering a glimpse into global best practices and innovations. Attendees were encouraged to explore FIB’s resources, such as bulletins, the Structural Concrete journal, and the model code, which serve as comprehensive guides for engineers worldwide. Steph Moss also highlighted FIB’s active engagement in social media and educational outreach, emphasizing the value of networking and sharing knowledge within the engineering community. The webinar concluded by inviting attendees to consider FIB membership for access to extensive resources and networking opportunities, reinforcing the collaboration between PCI and FIB in promoting international standards and practices in precast concrete.
Keywords
Precast Concrete
FIB Commission 6
Nicole Clow
Technical Knowledge
International Collaboration
Sustainability
Seismic Retrofitting
Networking
Engineering Community
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