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DECEMBER 2017 | 13 PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY ARMTEC Concrete pouring of slabs and columns resulted in owner Cadillac Fairview achieving occupancy sooner than planned. Currently Lafarge is working on the ICE District in downtown Edmonton, with a showpiece being a recent 7,700-cubic-metre raft slab pour. William Ainsworth, sales representative for Lafarge, explains that this was for the third tower of the district and had the distinc- tion of being almost double the largest continuous pour in the city's history. "To pull all this together took a cou- ple of months of planning, and we had to bring in driv- ers from all over Alberta and even from Saskatchewan," he says. "We had to run two separate shifts because we had to pour for over 30 hours – and it ended up being 35." Four pumps were located onsite, serviced by three separate plants; careful co-ordination of drivers, flag- gers and other personnel was crucial in pulling off the complex logistics of this operation. Lafarge is one of seven members of the Cement Association of Canada (CAC), which is proud to note that these members manufacture all of the cement pro- duced in Canada, thus providing a reliable, domestic supply of the material. As an organization dedicated to promoting con- crete as a solution to sustainability challenges, the CAC recently staged a national seminar series revolv- ing around the fourth edition of the Concrete Design Handbook, in order to give structural engineers and designers a thorough understanding of the CSA A23.3 design standard provisions. Topics covered included flexure, compression mem- bers and walls, slabs and deflections, shear, founda- tions, anchorage and seismic design – and the result was that attendees better understood the rationale behind the changes in the latest standard, as well as became familiar with the Concrete Design Handbook 4th Edition and the material covered by the publication. In the precast realm, ultra-thin panels are a huge trend, specified by designers and developers to achieve cost savings due to their light weight and ease of instal- lation; and Armtec's ARCIS ultra-thin precast panels have successfully been marketed as "forever changing the way" designers think about architectural precast. But Brandon MacMillan, Armtec's sales direc- tor, engineered precast for Central Canada, is equally excited by the impact his company's CarbonCast High Performance Insulated Wall Panels with C-GRID car- bon fibre epoxy grid shear connections is having on construction projects. "With R values steadily increas- ing, developers are trying to get away from concrete panels with areas of no insulation, and this is the per- fect solution," he says. ARCIS ultra-thin precast panels from Armtec. Admixture.indd 1 2016-12-20 12:54 PM Harris Rebar.indd 1 2016-11-03 1:24

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