As the construction industry continues to embrace digitalization, we’ve been seeing a lot of concrete contractors ask after our . While other sensors are available on the market, there’s still a lot to like about Maturix, which we recently discussed in an interview with Casper Harlev, the co-creator of Maturix and the CEO of Sensohive Technologies ApS. Part of the appeal is being able to use the sensors to monitor numerous locations wirelessly. There’s no need to physically go to the worksite to check the data. The sensors do it all instead, monitoring and logging each location’s temperature and strength development every 10 minutes. They then send that data to a user-friendly, cloud-based platform, letting contractors easily see all the information they want through any desired connected device. It’s a great way to streamline concrete construction. And these award-winning sensors have certainly proven themselves worthy of that ability through !
We have been thrilled with all this feedback, so we wanted to celebrate and share an interview that we recently conducted with Allen Lindsey, president of .
Currently, he’s been working on an for the Grady Memorial Hospital in Georgia. It’s around 53,883.76 m2 (580,000 ft2), and so far, it’s required over 500 monitoring locations. This would have been time-consuming work had Allen used traditional on-site data loggers. But with Maturix, he managed to expedite construction and make it easier to handle.
Join us as we interview Allen for more details on how Maturix’s thermal monitoring has changed his construction for the better.
Let’s first delve a little more into what Fly & Form Structures, Inc. is all about. What can you tell us about your company?
We’re a regional contractor, a concrete contractor, in the American Southeast. Our footprint covers mainly Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, Florida, and North and South Carolina. Our specialty is multistory buildings.
Which thermal monitoring project have you been using Maturix for?
The Grady Cass project. It is probably the most complicated project we’ve done as it relates to thermal monitoring. The engineer pretty much classified every foundation for the project and probably a third of its grade beams as mass concrete elements. In addition to that, we have a significant number of columns that are either 40 x 40 or 44 x 44 that have been classified as mass concrete. And on the fifth floor, we have seven transfer girders that are 96-by-50 in. Those are also considered to be mass concrete.
How has this work been different from past projects?
For us, this project is way more than what we would normally see. Typically, we’re going to see some large pile caps under our elevator cores. These are generally a couple thousand yards. But for this project, we’ve been making mass concrete pile cap pours that are 60 yd since early June.
Why did you choose Maturix for this work?
The number one reason that we chose the Maturix product is its ability to remotely monitor the sensors using a web interface, which we can display on a PC, an iPad, an android phone, or an iPhone. It pretty much gives us instant data.
How does it compare to the previous systems you used for thermal monitoring?
The previous systems that I had used all required us to have a remote that we could plug into the wires in order to retrieve the data points on say an hourly or a six-hour or a daily basis.
After spending some time talking with a Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²Ê¹ÙÍøÍøÖ· representative and reviewing Maturix, however, it seemed that using the remote wireless technology that Maturix has would be a tremendous cost-saving item for us. That’s because with the number of elements and other pieces we were going to monitor, basically, I’d have had one or two individuals who’d do nothing but run around and retrieve data points all day long. They’d be doing nothing but that and putting them into Excel spreadsheets to develop .
How has Maturix performed so far?
The sensors have performed very well. We’ve had zero data loss in the sensors. And the web interface has been very nice for us. It’s given us the ability to set up alarms and different configurations. So if we see a cap or a mass concrete element, we can see when the Delta T [] is getting close to the maximum, a sensor stops reading, or the temperature takes a significant decrease.
In fact, we’ve seen that happen a couple of times with some rain events. When the pile caps would get full of water, we’d see the outside temperatures go down really quickly. So we could get somebody over there to pump water and put some extra blankets on the area to kind of restore the process.
So the Maturix web interface has been very helpful to us in that regard.
How has it helped you communicate with the project engineers?
Well, we have two. We have our engineer who wrote our thermal control plan and the engineer of record. So they get a copy of the Maturix reports basically every morning.
Essentially, we come in, and the first thing we do is print the PDFs off of the software on the Maturix cloud. We send those reports out, and our engineer gets a copy of it. Then, we also send the reports directly to the engineer of record.
Each engineer has an account on our system so they can look at the data in real time. So if they have some questions, they can get on and look at the data and see even beyond the information we’re sending them.
It’s been very nice. The communication process with the design team and the engineer of record has been very simple actually because of that.
Would you recommend Maturix to others in need of streamlined thermal monitoring?
I would not go back from Maturix ever again. We as a company will continue to do these mass concrete pours and these thermal control plans. And we’ll be using the hardware we have from Maturix just because of its ease of use and wireless capabilities.
I mean, I had a project manager walk in the office not too long ago and see all the data and all the transmitters. He wanted to know if we were going to use them on our future projects. I said yes. It was the reason why we bought them. So we can use them and take them from project to project. And it’s definitely going to be the way we’re going to move forward.