Slabs are significant components in most structures, such as buildings or bridges. At this moment, a certain concrete slab may be serving: Civil Engineering Thesis, DkiT, Ireland

Slabs are significant components in most structures, such as buildings or bridges. At this moment, a certain concrete slab may be serving, for example, as the floor of the reader’s room, walkway the pavement outside his window, or a deck in the bridge on his way between home and office. Definitely, the world is such today. However, it was not the same only 100 years ago.

Dating from the construction of the first concrete buildings at the end of the nineteenth century, reinforced concrete structures started to spread all over the world, and they have been most widely used in the construction industry until the present. Reinforced concrete technologies have traced a long way of evolution during that period. Many design and construction methods have been developed, new building structures and elements have been invented and improved, normative documents and standards have been set, merged, and systemized.

However, not only the design and construction methods have been evolved. The way of working has also been changing with time. Thus, back a few decades ago, engineers were doing all calculations and producing drawings by using only a sheet of paper and a pencil. Nowadays, we have all sorts of computer applications, which make it possible to quickly perform any of those
complicated operations just by a few clicks of a mouse. The progress will not stop in one place, and, thanks to the human mind, there is always something new and interesting to study and understand. In our case, such a novelty is the Expanded Polystrene slab that requires a small investigation in the field of BIM technologies.