Univ. of Missouri’s Historic Memorial Union, Built to Honor WWI Dead, Gets New Life with TerraThane Geotechnical Foam

MOUNT AIRY, NC—The Univ. of Missouri’s iconic Memorial Union, with its Gothic architecture and central bell tower, was built to commemorate the 117 Mizzou alumni who lost their lives in WWI, and has been under silent attack. Like all buildings built atop the ancient dry riverbeds of the tributary valleys of the Missouri River, the soil beneath is a mixture of sand, clay, and fine rock particles and highly susceptible to erosion from water. So, while hundreds of thousands of students walked the hallways of the building, water escaping steam pipes far beneath caused severe drying of the soil and destabilized it enough so that erosion created voids, or cavities in the soil, some as large as four feet. In turn, this caused the concrete slab floors atop the voids to become uneven, and the eventual danger of even greater problems loomed large.

A team of engineers went after the problem, including MU alums, Matt VanderTuig, P.E., of Bartlett & West, Jefferson City, MO, and Mark Whitehead, P.E. with extensive structural design and environmental engineering management experience. They suggested to Chris Hentges, president of SIRCAL Contracting, Jefferson City, the general contractor in charge of the job, that instead of using the older method of mudjacking, a highly involved and intrusive process of drilling large holes in the slabs—sometimes removing the slabs entirely—and pumping “mud”, ultra-heavy Portland cement-based grout, into the void, then leveling the slabs, that the university might better be served by using the newer polyurethane foam system method called “foamjacking” or “polyjacking.”

[Editor] Be sure to click through for the rest of the interesting project from GeoPrac sponsor NCFI Polyurethanes and TerraThane! [/Editor]

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Foundation Industry Launches Standardized Open Source Tool to Compare the Sustainability of Different Foundation Techniques

Hawthorne, NJ (May 1, 2013): The European Federation of Foundation Contractors (EFFC) and the Deep Foundations Institute (DFI) are urging the geotechnical sector to make immediate use of their jointly-developed, pioneering carbon calculator tool, the Geotechnical Carbon Calculator.

Developed using internationally recognized standards, the Geotechnical Carbon Calculator is believed to be one of the construction industry’s first standardized and collaboratively produced carbon calculator tools at the European and international level.

Carbon measurement is at the core of the construction industry’s approach to sustainability. The Geotechnical Carbon Calculator uses a standardized emission factors database to make the analysis of the carbon footprint of a foundation project consistent and comparable across the foundation industry.

[Editor] Click through for the rest of this interesting press release from the Deep Foundations Institute! [/Editor]

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