One of the main elements of modern construction – reinforcing steel – has had an ingenious makeover which cuts wastage and speeds up building work.

One of the main elements of modern construction – reinforcing steel – has had an ingenious makeover which cuts wastage and speeds up building work.

With over $28 billion worth of work undertaken in Australia in the last quarter of 2007, the building and construction industry is a huge contributor to this country’s economy.

One of the most significant costs to the industry is expenditure on the most basic, but essential of building supplies – reinforcing steel. Australian company Monkey Steel has taken an innovative approach to the problems of wastage and efficiency when it comes to joining reinforcing steel.

“We started the company about three years ago and we started from the position of an original idea, and that was to form a coupling joint out of the host reinforcing bar itself,” said Monkey steel managing director Julian Mitton.

“That was an original concept, it hadn’t been developed anywhere else in the world and we saw there were some unique advantages we might be able to gain from that system, particularly being able to increase the precision of the joint itself and also increase the ductility of the bar as a coupler and using the same steel to form the coupling we could actually preserve the existing qualities of the bar.

“So what we do is we form a series of interlocking teeth into the bar in a very particular shape and then there’s a sleeve that just slides into place over that to hold it into place until the concrete is poured. But the sleeve itself doesn’t take any load and in fact we’re going to be producing those out of plastic as we enter the market.”

The concept has drawn attention from sections of the construction industry both domestically and abroad. As Julian Mitton explained, the company is targeting high-rise and large scale civil construction.

“Things like, for example the new Gateway Bridge (in Brisbane) duplication where we’ve had a successful trial completed just recently,” Julian says.

“Things like nuclear power stations for instance, where we’re getting a lot of interest from global builders like Bechtel and also the big high-rises I mentioned where there’s an enormous amount of steel used in the vertical application and also some other particular applications where we think we’ve got some unique advantages, in say, wall to floor joins, which are heavy requirements going up in big high-rise constructions.”

The work that went into the development of the Monkey Steel system saw the company pick up the innovations and inventions category award at the Sydney round of the Engineers Australia Award for Excellence.

“It was such an honour to be awarded the Sydney prize,” Mr Mitton said.

“I guess to be held in such esteem among the engineering community at large, which included projects of incredible magnitude and excellence and technology, so to win that gave everyone an enormous sense of pride in what they had achieved and are achieving with the product.

“Also, (pride in) the production process itself. It is a fully automated process using the latest in robotic technology and computer controlled systems which would not have really been possible five years ago, so we’re really at the front edge of that in the industry.”