Anyone who has ever worked in a construction company and dealt with concrete knows how challenging the tasks are. As a construction manager, you have to consider many aspects, from optimizing the time and resources needed to implementing safety regulations and quality standards. To achieve this, you need to closely monitor the behavior of concrete throughout its lifecycle, especially in terms of temperature and compressive strength. Digital concrete monitoring with IoT sensors offers tremendous benefits in this regard.
How does digital concrete monitoring work?
IoT sensors such as ConcR measure the temperature development directly in the concrete and automatically send the data to the cloud. In doing so, you benefit from numerous advantages:
- Track concrete temperature and compressive strength in real time.
- Prevent problems by being automatically notified of deviations
- Access comprehensive digital documentation
- Build more sustainably with green construction
How does digital concrete monitoring help in practice?
Increase and quality of safety
- Daily life on a construction site is quite hectic. Time and cost pressures are high. Nevertheless, quality and safety come first. This also applies to concrete casting. In practice, it usually looks like this: As soon as the concrete truck arrives at the construction site, test specimens have to be made for the fracture tests and other samples to ensure the quality of the concrete mix. Based on their maturation, a decision is made as to when the formwork can be removed. The problem with this conventional method is the different conditions. Even if the specimens are right next to it, there is no guarantee that they will develop exactly like the concrete on the construction site. So the specimens that go through the fracture tests in the lab don’t necessarily have the same condition. If something goes wrong here, the consequences are enormous.
Time Savings
- One of the main problems that ConcR sensors solve is the long waiting time. It takes time for concrete to reach its compressive strength. Sometimes, however, such a long waiting period is not necessary at all. This is where real-time monitoring by concrete sensors can help. It allows you to optimize your project schedule and save time while maintaining high safety standards. For each cast element, digital concrete monitoring can save you between one and four days. So on average, construction time can be reduced by 30 days. This corresponds to an average time saving of 24 percent.
Cost savings
Shorter construction time also means lower costs. If you can complete your construction project one month earlier, you will also save on indirect costs during that period. But the savings are even greater – The fact that you can form each cast element one to four days in advance means you need 35% less formwork than planned. On average, using digital concrete monitoring like ConcR reduces project costs by four percent.
Optimization of resources
All measurement data is digitally documented. This allows you to track the maturing process of your concrete in real time and make better decisions about subsequent steps. This also affects your resource planning: reliable results instead of assumptions allow you to use your resources more efficiently.
How is the maturity of concrete determined? Here we have summarized the common methods for you!
Newsletter – Concrete Monitoring
Stay up to date with the latest industry trends.
Case study: Concrete savings potential through digital concrete monitoring
To back up the facts, we created a simulation. Our object is a residential building complex in Berlin. It consists of four buildings, each with five floors and a basement. The floor area is 20,000 square meters. In our tender we foresee a construction phase of 150 days with a formwork quantity of 3,000 sqm. We have built in a buffer of two weeks between the individual construction phases. We have calculated both models, once with the classic concrete monitoring with test specimens in the laboratory test, once with the digital concrete monitoring with our ConcR sensors.
The result
- By using the ConcR sensors, the formwork could be removed an average of two days earlier than planned for each concreting operation. This saved a total of 33 days of construction time.
- The formwork was immediately reused in the next cycle, so that about one third of the formwork was saved here.
The table below shows the specific saves achieved through the use of ConcR sensors:
ConcR sensors are available in different versions – as a model for permanent embedding in concrete or in the reusable version. Contact us if you have any questions.
