Above: A self-consolidating concrete wall under construction at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Ill.
Professor David A. Lange and CEE alumni Jacob D. Henschen (BS 07, MS 09, PhD 18) and Daniel I. Castaneda (MS 10, PhD 16) have won the American Concrete Institute’s (ACI) 2020 Wason Medal for Most Meritorious Paper. The award was conferred for their co-authored paper, “Formwork Pressure Model for Self-Consolidating Concrete Using Pressure Decay,” which appeared in the May 2018 ACI Materials Journal.
This award has for more than 100 years been ACI’s way of acknowledging their best paper of the year. This is the third time Lange has won the prestigious award. The only other University of Illinois faculty member to have won more than once was R.E. Copeland, who won twice in 1941 and 1958.
The paper developed a new method to predict how to safely construct tall walls using self-consolidating concrete (SCC). In addition to laboratory studies, the Illinois team worked with Mortensen Construction to measure pressures on 45-foot-tall walls for an addition to the OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Ill. The full wall was cast in only six hours in a single continuous pour. The Illinois team monitored pressure and demonstrated that the pressure did not exceed the strength of the forms.
“Proper understanding of the decay in SCC formwork pressure opens the door for SCC to be more rapidly cast in tall structures,” Lange said.
Henschen and Castaneda completed their Ph.D. programs under Lange. Henschen is now an assistant professor of civil engineering at Valparaiso University. Castaneda is an assistant professor in the department of engineering at James Madison University.