I've never had an interest in structural engineering, but that changed two years ago.
My father has been a civil engineer for almost 30 years in the precast concrete production field. Yet, I didn't have any interest in the field except CAD software and heavy equipment, because they looked cool.
Precast Concrete is a product that is made in a factory, before being shipped to the construction site.
Fresh concrete is poured into formwork and cured, then it's stored in the factory until it has hardened and gained its strength before shipping.
Management is hard
Even though I visited construction sites a couple of times, I noticed that project management was extremely hard and requires a lot of willpower. Also, on the management side, they heavily relied on Excel.
Nothing wrong with relying on Excel to be honest, it's one of the best software ever built. However, I believe there's a simpler way.
When I was talking with my dad, he said:
"Why aren't we building software to make my job easier? I know the job, you know how to program." And I replied, 'Sure, why not!'
This conversation was almost 2 years ago and since then we've been building a platform to make it a reality.
Basics of Concrete
Learning the basics was actually trivial for the production of concrete.
It's very similar to making a muffin but at a large scale.
There are some ingredients to make concrete.
- Water
- Cement
- Sand
- Coarse Aggregate
- Fine Aggregate
- Chemical Admixtures
- Other materials...
Notes on Concrete Production
- A basic concrete mixture consists of these materials, and each has defined ratios for each concrete class.
- The concrete class defines the strength of the concrete measured in megapascals (MPa).
- Strength is measured by break tests. Samples are collected from each concrete pour.
- There are two types of samples: Cylinder and cube.
- Concrete class is defined as CX/Y where X defines the cylinder strength and Y is the cube strength.
- Samples are tested in the compression machines until they break.
- Tests are usually applied at 3, 7, and 28 days of concrete age. At 28 days, it's accepted that concrete gained its full strength.
- A precast construction facility doesn't have to produce its own concrete; it can be outsourced. However, the producer should be relatively close to the facility since concrete hardens quickly.
Development
Spreadsheets are great but lack some of the crucial parts.
- Error-prone; manual data entry allowed.
- It can be hard for a new engineer to understand the workflow.
- Limited collaboration, only one person can edit at a time.
... the list goes on.
PrecastX will solve all of these issues, plus:
- Organization Management:
- Allow users to create organizations,
- Inviting new users to an organization,
- Fine-grained user roles
- Concrete mixing & design:
- Mix Design
- Resource Usage Insights
- Break Test Management
- Applying Maturity Method (new blog post coming soon on this topic)
- Precast concrete production:
- Project Management
- Quality Control Workflow
- Concrete Castings to Precast
- Formwork management:
- Auditing duty cycles
- Keeping available and busy times on a sleek calendar
I don't plan to add new features until the checkboxes are completed :)
Conclusion
I believe PrecastX will fill the management gaps in concrete production. I'll share more about the development process for PrecastX on my X Account - @memetsumerr