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Is the Concrete Industry on a Diet?

7/1/2003

Those acquainted with me personally know that I urgently need to be on a diet to lose some weight. My wife has been after me on such a crusade for more than a decade. On the other hand, my beautiful wife is always on a diet-but she doesn't have to be.

What does all the personal background have to do with the concrete industry? Comparatively and unfortunately, I think that the concrete industry is on a diet of sorts without knowing it. A diet? Yes, a diet with regard to young people. Young people? Bear with me.

ACI has gone through a great generational transformation over the last decade. Its committees, Board of Direction, and headquarters staff are full of young, bright people working hard toward our goals, with many of them occupying leadership roles. For example, Sharon Wood is a young, brilliant professor at the University of Texas-Austin who chairs the Technical Activities Committee and has served ACI for many years with many more still to come.

The "diet" or deficiency I see concerns concrete engineering students and new design professionals and what they are exposed to during their education and later in the office. It is no longer a requisite in all university civil engineering schools for students to learn about cement, concrete mixtures, or concrete design. Young engineers can finish school with just a dozen hours in mixture design and without having taken a concrete design course. There are now several schools lacking advanced concrete design courses at the undergraduate level. Programs exist where the concrete design course is a mere elective among dozens of other technical offerings, or the student simply chooses between "Steel Design" and "Concrete Design" as a requisite for a bachelor's degree.

We need to orchestrate a reversal in those undergraduate curriculums if we want the engineers of future generations to be knowledgeable in concrete technology. This will not be an easy task, but it wasn't easy 100 years ago when concrete technology was emerging and research in it was just starting. Yet, our founders created an industry based on hard work and upon knowledge that needed to be created, disseminated, and improved. It all reached a pinnacle probably three decades ago. In the last few decades, the civil engineering curriculum, as a whole, has suffered downgrading, not only related to concrete but in other areas as well.

I think the times now require serious work toward pushing the concrete technology curriculum back into the mainstream of civil engineering education. This is a task we must perform, a task we cannot postpone, and a task ACI has to lead so that our industry remains solid.

Besides students, I also noted previously the "diet" with regard to young professionals. Increasingly today, structural engineering has become a business operation. Twenty-five years ago, only major design firms and universities had access to structural analysis programs. On the desk of every designer there would be at least three handbooks: the concrete design handbook, the concrete column design handbook, and the American Institute of Steel Construction handbook. Back then, designing a concrete structure was competitive in terms of the tools available for the mainstream designer.

Yet, in the last decade, we have seen structural analysis programs produced by the dozens that include steel design as part of their software, but only a few relatively expensive ones to handle concrete design. At the design desk, the decision for engineers and owners is a simple one: If I don't need concrete and steel can be a choice, why go through the trouble of selecting a material for which I don't have the proper tools?

There are three reasons for the lack of tools: (a) ACI 318 keeps increasing in complexity; (b) a need for more effort from our industry; and (c) a need for greater support from ACI in developing better tools. What we must realize now is that, at the designer desk, concrete is fighting against competitive technology and losing ground.

The weaknesses in civil engineering curriculums and design tools are forcing our industry into some unwanted "diets." We must develop specific agendas to better compete and fight back. By doing so, we cannot fail, and only then, the concrete industry shall prevail.

José M. Izquierdo-Encarnación, President
American Concrete Institute
pepe@porticus-ingenieria.com

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