World-first use of concreting digital twin helps Gammon reduce waste, ensure social distancing, and reduce and deliver on time.
Gammon Construction (Gammon), a joint venture between Balfour Beatty and Jardine Matheson was an early adopter of ConcreteDNA Pro and was the first company to use it as part of the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation’s Advanced Manufacturing Center (AMC) project in Tseung Kwan O Industrial Area. They wanted to mitigate project delay risk, reduce concrete waste, and innovate their construction tech stack.
Converge's ConcreteDNA, integrates concrete sensor data with building information modelling (BIM) and provides in-depth material performance analytics to form the first real-time digital twin of in-situ concreting.
The enabling hardware behind ConcreteDNA is the Signal Sensor, a wireless embedded sensor that is embedded in a concrete pour and measures the compressive strength of concrete as it cures. The Signal Live Hub, a cellular gateway, automatically transmits sensor data to the cloud in real time where it is viewable on any device on the ConcreteDNA software.
Gammon used ConcreteDNA to gain real-time and in-situ insight into the performance of concrete. Allowing them to strike concrete when it actually reaches critical strength based on real world weather and environmental factors rather than data cubes that give single data points in "ideal conditions".
“The AMC project team no longer needs to collect data from each pour, saving considerable manpower and avoiding potential human error. The curing predictions and notifications that a pour has reached the required strength also mean the right people get to the right place at the right time. The contextual information to the curing predictions has allowed our team to coordinate better, allocate resources more efficiently, and mitigate project risks by planning ahead with better 4D oversight.” Director - Building at Gammon, Sammy Lai
Thanks to the real-time in-situ concrete strength data, Gammon had greater confidence in the performance in their concrete, allowing them to reduce cube testing by approximately 14,000 cubes on the project.
Additionally, Insights from the performance analytics on ConcreteDNA facilitates selecting the right mix to suit programme requirements and reducing overdesign. This means less cement is used and the project has a smaller carbon footprint.
Using BIM to visualise the progress of concrete pours, project teams were able to gain macro-level oversight of progress for reporting and gained the ability to respond dynamically opportunities in sequence shifting given the faster than expected curing times.
Thanks to the remote concrete performance monitoring capabilities of ConcreteDNA and the automatic data collection from sensors by the Signal Live Hub, fewer people are needed on-site.