Service-Life & Durability Design Engineering: Design of durable concrete mixtures to meet the 100-year service-life in the Third Set of Locks of the Panama Canal

Información adicional: Ignacio Segura (ignacio.segura@upc.edu)

Dr. Marchand co-founded Service d’Expertise en Matériaux (S.E.M.) Inc. in 1989 and SIMCO Technologies (SIMCO) Inc. in 1997. He is an internationally recognized expert in concrete mixture design, degradation mechanism analysis and durability modeling of concrete infrastructure. From 1992 to 2012, Dr. Marchand has led a productive academic career, as a tenured Professor for the Department of Civil Engineering at Laval University, during which he also held a Canada Research Chair and a NSERC Industrial Research Chair. As principal officer of SIMCO, Dr. Marchand heads the strategic initiatives of the organization and is responsible for negotiating alliances with key partners. Over the course of his career, he has been directly involved as durability consultant in numerous construction projects around the world.

Abstract of the conference

Concrete remains the material of choice for the construction industry. Flexible and economical, it is used for a wide range of applications. This sustained interest for concrete has pushed engineers and researchers around the world to innovate. The introduction of new chemical admixtures and supplementary cementing materials has led to the development of a wide range of products, from high-performance concrete to self-leveling mixtures. To make sure that structures built with concrete would be safe and durable, numerous regulatory organizations have recently decided to develop a new generation of guide specifications centered on the expected performance of concrete. Pushed by a wide-range of stakeholders, performance specifications are now increasingly used in Canada, the United States and elsewhere around the world. A key point of this approach is that it often relies on numerical modeling to select the most durable solution. After a brief review of different guide specifications currently used around the world, typical design-build projects where performance specifications were used in conjunction with numerical modeling will be presented. Special emphasis will be put on the design and construction of the Third Set of Locks (the “new” Panama Canal).