BlackboardDr. Mtenga Receives ICRI Award
Dr. Primus V. Mtenga, P.E. of Civil and Environmental Engineering Department wins the International Concrete Repair Institute (ICRI) Strengthening Category Award for his work, in which he used the emerging Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer technology for structural strengthening.
The Leon County Courthouse Parking Garage is a cast-in-place concrete structure with a capacity of more than 500 vehicles. The garage consists of five below-grade parking levels and a five-floor office structure above the parking levels. In addition to providing parking for the courthouse and nearby businesses, the garage also is home to a memorial honoring World War II veterans. Weighing approximately 135 tons, the statue sits on top of the courthouse's plaza deck, which also serves as the roof of the parking garage. Prior to construction of the memorial, tests revealed that the provided reinforcement was not adequate to carry the load from the monument. Additional inspection by Dr. Primus Mtenga, the Engineer of Record (ER) for the over $4.2 million project (Phase I to III), revealed that the garage was already showing serious structural deterioration on all floor levels, leading the owner to pursue and implement a comprehensive structural evaluation and strengthening program.
Dr. Primus Mtenga working together with Structural Preservation Systems (SPS), a retrofit contactor based in Baltimore, Maryland, proposed a solution that involved pin-pointing each crack individually -- by location, size and the nature of the crack -- for epoxy injection. Full-depth cracks were pressure-injected, while other cracks were injected by the gravity feed method. Finally, slabs were strengthened using either a carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) strip system or span reduction using cast-in-place beams.
