Civil Renewables Inc. had the privilege of attending the 2024 ACI Foundation Technology Forum hosted by ACI’s Concrete Innovation Council (CIC) in beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico, on May 14-16. As usual, this event did not disappoint in terms of covered topics and the depth of coverage of such topics, as well as the choice of location and organization. The forum was held at the Hilton Santa Fe Historic Plaza, a beautiful historic facility at the heart of Santa Fe.

The technical event kicked off with several presentations on innovations and engineering marvels such as:

• Crearie’s Instant Air Meter, a handheld tool that has gone through many years of development and is now capable of providing instant concrete air readings comparable in reliability to results obtained through ASTM C231.

• SoFi Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Chargers and architectural marvel made possible through innovative engineering solutions spearheaded by Kiewit.

• Artificial intelligence applications in infrastructure condition assessment by Aren, Inc.

• On-board monitoring of fresh concrete properties for improved sustainability of concrete production.

• Concrete durability assessment through measurement of concrete air permeability - a presentation by Roberto Juan Torrent, the inventor the Proceq Torrent has been named after. We also learned the difference between “Labcrete,” “Realcrete,” and Covercrete.”

The morning session was concluded with a brief address by ACI Executive Vice President, Frederick H. Gribbe, on the importance of innovation. A key takeaway is that innovation is an accelerating process which takes place at the intersection of multiple variables. With global warming and the associated stark statistics as a background, the time is ripe for great innovation strides in concrete and construction technologies. The address was a great prelude to the remaining presentations which reflected the areas of interest of two new ACI centers of excellence:

• NEU Concrete: an ACI center of excellence for carbon neutral concrete, and

• PRO: an ACI center of excellence for advancing concrete productivity.

The presentations included extensive coverage of low-carbon concrete science and technological solutions, as well as an introduction to solving constructability challenges to advance construction productivity. Both of these areas are of primary interest to Civil Renewables as we work to reduce the carbon footprint of massive wind turbine foundations and improve their construction productivity through innovative constructability solutions.

We left the 2024 forum inspired and full of ideas that we can integrate in our work. The 2025 Technology Forum will be coming home to Denver, Colorado, on August 12-14, 2025. So, you can bet you will find us there!