Construction of buildings with prefabricated concrete walls and ceilings
Construction & Civil Engineering
Initially, I tackled the history of concrete in my thesis, focusing primarily on how we began using it, why it is most suitable, and actually began to determine what the future holds for us and why the future lies with prefabricated elements.
I researched the most common prefabricated concrete elements on the market at the moment, namely: prestressed roof elements, prestressed hollow ceilings, ceiling elements, T-T ceiling elements, hollow wall elements, solid concrete wall elements, and sandwich wall elements.
In the rest of my thesis, I focused on my specific case study, which is a multi-apartment building that we built with Gradnje Lenart d. o. o. in Lenart at Jurovska cesta 14. The research focused primarily on comparing the costs, construction time, and carbon footprint of sandwich concrete walls and ceiling slabs.
I found that, based on a basic calculation of bare costs, prefabricated concrete walls are approximately 20% more expensive, while concrete ceiling elements are approximately 15-20% cheaper, not taking into account the time aspect of building construction and the reduction in labor, which are significant advantages of prefabricated elements, further reducing construction costs.
The carbon footprint of prefabricated elements is lower than that of conventional concrete structures due to less handling of formwork elements, labor, and transport of materials to the construction site.
Based on this data, we can conclude that the cost of prefabricated construction is approximately the same as that of conventional construction, and in some cases even cheaper. Of course, this type of construction requires certain machinery (mobile cranes, cranes, etc.) and additional staff training, which is not a major problem in practice, as we can actually save on labor (which is known to be in short supply on the market anyway).
Similarly, larger projects using traditional construction methods require additional construction machinery, such as certain types of cranes.
In my opinion, the future belongs to prefabricated elements, which are becoming increasingly popular and are being used more and more by construction contractors. Concrete elements are not the only exception, as we are seeing more and more CLT (cross-laminated timber), skeletons, and similar products on the market, which further simplify or accelerate the construction process compared to the traditional method.
