Great Deltabeams on FIRE !

Fire rating is important, as it is important to understand how many minutes or hours one has time to run out of the building before the structure collapses in the case of fire. Or how many minutes the firemen have time to try to put the fire out.

This week was an important week for Peikko North America. The latest Deltabeam fire tests were done at the Underwriters Laboratories (UL) in USA with great success.

A test slab was casted already long time ago and on June 6th was the time of burning it from underneath. And it worked beyond expectations !  

We had four exposed steel specimens (without fireproofing material) with fire designs for 1h, 2h, 2.5h and 3h. The first specimen designed for one hour tested over two hours and the specimen designed for two hours tested over four hours. Four hours being highest listing UL can grant, the data from test will allow Peikko to obtain listings of 1h, 2h, 3h & 4h.

Build safe, build with Deltabeams !

Peikko Solutions for Insulated Concrete Walls

I am very proud about Peikko´s animations, somehow our marketing persons have been able to do a great job together with our animation provider.

The recent animation is about the solutions for Insulated Concrete Walls, please see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZvSkAxPDiw

In my almost 8 years at Peikko I have always had a problem to explain what we exactly manufacture and where our products are really applied for. Also the talk has always been for individual products. It is nice now to have some animation which gathers all our offering on sandwich wall elements - and there are many customers using our complete system already.

What do you think about the animation? Give comments !

Poland: Deltabeams and PSB Punching Systems

It is always very rewarding to get to deliver products in prestige projects. It is more fun to know that our items have ended up in nice-looking buildings in city centers than just in some industry hall in the middle of nowhere, although from the technical challenge point of view the latter could even be more demanding. The recent two nice project received were in Poland.

In South of Poland, the city of Cracow, Peikko is honored to deliver our composite beams, Deltabeams (see more at Deltabeam product information) , for a project of “Kapelanka 42”. The customer for us in this case is SKANSKA, and the project is a premium class office complex located in this historic, second largest city in the country. There will be almost 2 km of Deltabeams to be delivered, starting in July onwards.

In the Capital of Poland, Peikko will deliver punching reinforcement (PSB, see more at PSB Reinforcement System)  for Warsaw Spire project – an office building located in the centre of Warsaw. Warsaw Spire with total height of 220 m will be the second highest building in Poland. The total office space amounts to 100 000 square meters. The Warsaw Spire project received a prestigious architectural design award in 2011. The deliveries start this month.

It is interesting to see that modern building techniques are the everyday life in Poland.  And I am very proud that Peikko can be part of this development!

BAUMA or not to BAU, that is the Question

This week more than 400.000 construction professionals of Europe are gathering to the biggest industry trade show in the continent, BAUMA. This exhibition, taking place every 3 years, is quite an event, including e.g. real Zeppelin flying around the exhibition area to advertise one of the big machinery makers.

What always makes me wonder is that every 6 years there are two main construction exhibitions taking place in the exact same Munich location during the same spring period. BAU was in January (takes place every 2 years) and now BAUMA in April (takes place every 3 years). Competition between these two organizers is quite silly, and because of the rigid place reservation systems (if you are out of one exhibition one time, you will not have a good place anymore in the next event) all companies need to have proper places also during this "double-spring".

But based on the experience of the first three days, at least for Peikko it is worthwhile to be in both events. Our BAUMA booth was very full during the first three days, please find a picture taken on Monday morning prior opening below.

All the customers, all the co-operation partners, please come to visit us for the second time this year !!! At least the weather in Munich seems to be great, sunny and + 20 degrees C.  The exhibition is open until Sunday.

TERA Joint floorjoints & Australia

Peikko´s sales activities in Australia started during fall 2012, yet there are already a plentiful projects ordered and delivered in the region. The business started by our high quality floor joint of TERA Joint, with main focus on the East Coast of Australia. >

The main elements of success have been price, availability and quality. This seems to be like a no-brainer – how could you do any business in other way.  But let´s look at the details of these premises.

First of all, main items come to Australia to our fairly large factory in China. Based on the economies of scale, advantages in steel purchasing etc. our costs are reasonable and thus the prices we can sell are reasonable as well. We want our prices to be safe, not opportunistic.

Secondly, the availability is the key for any material in the construction business. This has meant for us to build quite extensive storage operations right from the very start in the Sydney area. Plus our factory has been very flexible in delivery times. And we have been determined not to overpromise our delivery times from factory either.


Peikko´s Trent Davis works from Sydney

Thirdly, with regards to product quality we have been surprised of the quality issues on the material so far used in the market. It looks like we really have a good and fitting product in the market.

I hope we can further develop the three things above and long-term successfully serve our new customers in Australia!

http://www.peikko.com.au/

Precast lifting systems – safety counts

They say that the best consultant for business is money. Unfortunately another parallel is also true – lethal accident is the best consultant for new governmental safety regulation.

The above seems to be very true in one developing country where several lives were lost at the building site when elements were lifted….and elements were fallen down to seven workers killing them. It seems that now everybody has started to really think how elements should be lifted and with what.  It looks like more regulation is to come and only standardized systems are allowed to be used – in order to not repeat the accidents.

For Peikko the precast lifting system has been a difficult challenge. The requirements from the market regarding the technical and quality issues have increased, however, the alternative for our customer have been to use certain low cost bulk products. In some cases regulators have been also allowing the use of some waste and leftovers from their own production (left-over rebar / rope from elements). Selling highest quality products at commodity prices is not always the best when trying to run business. But we have no doubts to continue in this key product range – it is essential in our precast product portfolio.

Peikko is one of the first companies to go for CE-marking in Europe not only for lifting clutches but also for lifting anchors. We have in-house production of anchors both in Germany and China and have constant quality control in our production – e.g. 100% clutches go through tensile testing in our Zhangjiagang factory.  

No compromises in Europe, no compromises in any other country.

Testing on products - for the sake of reliability

At Peikko we would like to do things right. We do 3D-design, we make FEM analysis, we make real-size steel samples of the products and study them further.  And at the end of the day, we need to make sure about the functionality of our products and for that – full-scale concrete tests are many times required.

To plan a test is a science itself. And actually, the plan is much more important than the breaking of the concrete or the steel itself. The test has to really demonstrate a real-life situation of a column, floor, balcony or other object in the building. Tests e.g. related to some new, coming product versions we did last year at the University of Greenwich, United Kingdom.

The reasons for testing are not just when we create new products. In 2012 we proved new calculations referring to EN –standards with regards to our punching shear to work in real life situation at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. See below some pictures of the test set-up.

Sometimes we also want to make sure that products we have been selling a longer time really work and the conventional wisdom is really correct. For this reason we have e.g. done extensive testing of lifting anchor products range with interesting results at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

To enlarge usage of products to extreme cases we also do further analyses like three-dimensional FEM thermal analysis for PCs corbel in Centre Technique et Industriel de la Construction Metallique (CTICM), France.

For the sake of proving that there are weaknesses in EN-standards and need to be changed in certain sections, we have done tests at the Technical University of Zilina, Slovakia. Sometimes it is better to prove that we are right not with calculations, because physical parts can lead to faster conclusions by the authorities.

During the last year there was also one very absurd case with one of our competitor.  The competitor claimed one of our connection products to be unsafe to both customers and to an approval body in one given country. This was the first ever claim in our 48-year history where Peikko were blamed to sell unsafe products.  Again, the successful tests on our product at the Technical Research Centre of Finland, VTT, Finland proved the claims of the competitor not only technically baseless, but at the same time convinced the authorities and boosted the trust on Peikko as a reliable partner. 

All in all, these were the tests done during 2012. In year 2013 we will have further development programs, such as Deltabeam tests to be done in North America. We remain committed to make our industry more safe and reliable, now and in the years to come.