With restoration running the gamut from the mundane to the complex, it follows that an equally wide range of products and services are at hand to help rehabilitate buildings, their foundations, floors, roads, and other man made infrastructure.
Because even the most resilient structures must be maintained, products and services are constantly evolving. That is evident at Kryton International Inc., whose suite of innovative Smart Concrete products include Krystal concrete waterproofing products, which are added to or placed on the concrete to lower the permeability of the concrete itself, replacing the need for traditional waterproofing membranes. This revolutionary crystalline technology reacts with water and unhydrated cement particles to form needle-shaped crystals that fill capillary pores and micro-cracks in the concrete to block pathways for water and waterborne contaminates.
Kris Till, product manager at Kryton, notes that his company has “been actively working with contractors and ready-mix producers” on real-time monitoring of concrete temperature and strength development, which not only can save labour in retrieving temperature data, but can help users make better decisions on striping forms, tensioning, and loading concrete.
This technology takes the form of Maturix Smart Concrete Sensors and addresses the problems associated with the lack of real-time insight in concrete strength and improves the time-consuming process around concreting, data collection, and lab specimens.
With Maturix, a standard type K thermocouple is embedded in the concrete to monitor concrete temperature. Data is transmitted to the cloud using a low power, long-range IoT network (Sigfox). In remote areas, if there is no coverage, a gateway is plugged into the Internet on the project. Data is automatically logged in the cloud and can be accessed from any online device. A calibrated maturity curve for the concrete mix being used can be entered to accurately predict strength development.
Till says, “The real-time strength data enables users to better understand their concrete and more accurately understand when formwork removal, tensioning, and loading can be done. This results in the ability to make better decisions that can allow efficiency improvements. In fact, Maturix can send alerts in real-time on when target strength has been achieved, or when temperature differential is a concern. It has many benefits over current construction practices and can not only save contractors time, and money, but it will allow them to build better.”
Indeed, the ability to monitor concrete is one of the major breakthroughs in restoration products and services overall.
Excerpted From Award
