B.V. Gusev
“Development of prefabricated reinforced concrete industry in the Soviet Union
(1981-1990)”
ISBN 978-5-902352-54-9
In the last 15 years, in the Russian construction industry, considerable attention is paid to the technology of monolithic house construction. After increasing the volumes, the majority of construction companies involved in monolithic construction, failed to form a reliable control system, so the quality of construction of monolithic buildings and structures remains on rather low level. Besides this, climate conditions do not allow to provide of some advantages of monolithic reinforced concrete in the northern regions of Eurasia.
The book introduces tremendous achievements and technical knowledge in the precast concrete industry of the second half of the twentieth century, the authors of these successes were the engineers of the Soviet school. So it is pleasant to note that in terms of production of precast concrete Soviet Union has the 1st place in the world, and by 1990s, has 135-140 million cubic meters produced.
The author examines the historical parallels which are especially important in the present: how the increased productivity was achieved, how the struggle was taken (and surely it was a struggle!) to improve the working conditions, reducing manual operations, energy costs and consumption of materials in the application of new technologies, and many other aspects. Boris Gusev, since the early 70s of the twentieth century, has been actively working on the problems of development of new efficient vibration equipment for production of wide range of concrete products. His work paid much attention to development of chemical mechanical activation in the preparation and compaction of concrete mixtures with use of low-frequency vibration equipment and a variety of plasticizers: in the beginning, the sulfate-type yeast brew, and later on, modified lignosulfonates; and further, chemical additives, superplasticizers and efficient plasticizers: S-3, 10-03, LSTM-2, and others.
In 1986, a task was posed to significantly improve labour productivity, up by 2.5 times (!), and the author headed a team to create fundamentally new technological lines. The results of the work on modernization of precast concrete enterprises made it possible to increase by 2-2.5 times the productivity, provide cost savings up to 10% of cement, and obtain significant reduction in the cost of construction.
The book shows that when the economy is unstable, one should first of all pay attention to the existing plants for the production of precast structures. This includes the creation of new jobs, upgrade of production to the level of the leading countries, improving the quality of residential and other buildings. The implementation of all these measures is impossible without extensive cooperation, and, from the direction of businesses, it is required the creation of new quality standards to ensure high accuracy and aesthetic expression.
The book can be used by engineers, scientists and students of construction specialties, and will be interesting to a wider audience of related professions, up to historians and economists.