Self-Aligning Structural Connection for Precast Concrete Wall Panels
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Due to the rise in modular construction in recent years, precast concrete construction has become increasingly common and as a result there has been a focus on improving the process. It has become popular as it can reduce construction times, be higher quality, and be more cost effective for large-scale projects; however, the industry has identified the lack of available connections for precast elements as a significant area for improvement, as well as the overall efficiency of the construction process. To address these issues, a bolted connection for use in total precast construction projects between wall panels was designed. The new connection is self-aligning and aims to reduce the accumulation of tolerance errors that can occur in precast construction. To do this, the connection uses a perforated steel frame within the wall panels that u-shaped inserts are bolted to. The frame is responsible for maintaining squareness and alignment rather than the surrounding concrete and the improved accuracy may allow for mechanical, electrical, and plumbing components to be installed in the wall framing in the plant and further reduce on-site construction times. For the horizontal connection between adjacent wall panels, a z-plate is used between u-shaped inserts, while for the vertical connections that span across floor slabs, a long flat bar connects the u-shaped inserts. This examined the fit of the connections and tested this by assembling three concrete wall panels, two lower panels and one upper panel, to assess the constructability of both the connection types.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".