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ABU Online
Our Design Professional ABU Online events were created to help you with your retaining wall needs. Our local production and sales partners will be happy to schedule in person training on any topics you see below (call us if you are looking for those individuals) but feel free to use these to help with immediate needs.
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Design Professionals
Upcoming Events:
Allan Block 3D Modeling Tool
AB Walls Design Software Advance Tutorial - Part 2
Wednesday December 18, 2019 (60 min)
Sign up: 8 AM CST
Sign up: 10 AM CST
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Sign up: 4 PM CST
AB Walls 3D Modeling Tool: Sell More Projects with 3D Models
Tuesday January 07, 2020
(30 min)
Sign up: 8 AM CST
Sign up: 10 AM CST
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Sign up: 4 PM CST
Intro to Limit Equilibrium (LEM)
Thursday January 23, 2020
(60 min)
Sign up: 8 AM CST
Sign up: 10 AM CST
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Sign up: 4 PM CST
AB Walls Design Software Advance Tutorial - Part 3
Thursday February 27, 2020
(60 min)
Sign up: 8 AM CST
Sign up: 10 AM CST
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Sign up: 4 PM CST
SRW Design Considerations for Bioretention Pond
Thursday March 26, 2020
(60 min)
Sign up: 8 AM CST
Sign up: 10 AM CST
Sign up: 2 PM CST
Sign up: 4 PM CST
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A NOTE ABOUT CALENDAR REMINDERS: Once registered for an ABU Online event, you will receive an email notification with a calendar invite attached. Simply open that calendar invite and save it to your calendar for easy access in the future. In addition, you should receive 2-3 email reminders about the event.
Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn to see all our great announcements and upcoming trainings.
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Inspiring Project Ideas
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Brenda Cowan Elementary
New School Includes Stellar New Exterior
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Fayette County has been growing and their current elementary schools were bursting at the seams with students, even bringing in portable trailers to serve as classrooms. They needed a new school. The school board, county and local city planning departments worked together to pick the new site along Athens Boonesboro Road.
This was a large site that needed your typical clearing and regrading to make it suitable for the new, large, one story school. To facilitate the desired open, recreational grassy areas and playgrounds, the landscape architects planned on regrading the hilly site with two sizable retaining walls. These walls would not only allow for the level playing surfaces but would also act as a separation between the wooded wetlands directly west of the site. The landscape architects (LA) first specified the two walls, roughly 8,700 ft2 (808 m2) using large, wet cast concrete block commonly referred to as Big Block. The local Allan Block producer, Reading Rock, and their technical representative Michael Baker, set up a meeting with the LA and the site designers to discuss all wall options for the site. Michael, along with the local wall engineer, Mike Mattingly, laid out a clear plan for providing an AB wall that would solve the site grading concerns and provide the desired aesthetic.
The most amazing part was that all of this would be accomplished with a much lower installed cost. The original alternative Michael and Mike put together was using the AB Classic block, which came in at an astonishing 40% savings over the big block walls that were proposed. With this eye-opening understanding of Allan Block walls and their cost effectiveness, the LA investigated upscaling the wall to the four block Allan Block Ashlar patterned wall. This type of wall costs a little more in labor and materials but still came in with a 28% overall savings for the project. Armed with this new information the LA and site designers promptly issued an addendum disqualifying the big block specifications in lieu of the AB Ashlar pattern.
Check out the case study for the full details on this project - Brenda Cowan Elementary.
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Fences Above Retaining Walls
What do I need to know?
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Fences and railings are becoming standard features above retaining walls to provide fall protection and privacy. For the initial planning we recommend that the location of the fence is considered before the wall is even designed, as it could have an effect on the wall design. In our Fences Above Retaining Walls Tech Sheet, it is preferable to have the fences located 3 ft (1 m) behind the back of the wall. If they are placed closer, top of wall overturning calculations should be ran.
In order to properly design the top of wall to resist the overturning force applied from a fence above the wall, you need to know a few things about the wall, fence, and site conditions.
- What is the fence height and desired post spacing?
- What are the lateral wind loads and/or pedestrian loads?
- What is the friction angle of the soils used in the wall design?
- Are there any additional surcharges such as a roadway or slope above the wall?
- What is the geogrid type, length, spacing between layers, and position in the top portion of the wall?
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With these parameters, an engineer can calculate an overturning moment that can be used for the design of the post depth and specify the final geogrid position, strength and length as laid out in Allan Block's Top of Wall Fence Overturning Tech Sheet.
To assist engineers in accounting for the overturning force, Allan Block has also created a Mathcad file that, when used in conjunction with AB Walls, can determine if the wall design is adequate to withstand the additional force. If you want to request a copy of the Mathcad files, or would like to have Allan Block run a preliminary overturning calculation, contact engineering@allanblock.com.
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AB Walls+Terraces FREE UPGRADE
(Coming Soon)
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After thirty plus years since Allan Block first brought our mortarless concrete retaining wall block to market, we continue to innovate and support the technical side of the business. AB Walls has provided thousands of engineers, on hundreds of thousands of projects, a comprehensive design tool for segmental retaining walls.
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In our effort to not have this be a proprietary black box program, we wrote and published the AB Engineering Manual, a comprehensive technical manual with the step-by-step methodology. We also included a MathCAD file with all of the detailed equations to facilitate hand calculations, and an Excel based comparison tool to allow a cross check to the methodology of your choice. With monumental additions to handle complex composite structures, no-fines concrete designs, and 3D Modeling, we have more than kept pace with the evolution of both the segmental retaining wall industry specifically and computer applications technology in general.
Throughout the many releases and updates of AB Walls, we have refined and worked to include those items that support the Best Practices approach to design of SRWs. This commenced with our industry leading seismic testing that clearly highlighted the advantages of a maximum of two course, 16 inch (400mm), reinforcement spacing.
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The latest addition to AB Walls will include the ability to configure and evaluate terraced site structures. Using a Limit Equilibrium Method (LEM) refined by Dr. Dov Leshchinsky, built around a Bishops slip arc approach, we are able to quantify the amount and location of loads on the layers of geogrid reinforcement. In addition to removing the need to model terraces as surcharges and guessing how this will affect the overall site stability, we can now move to a refined two step approach for the evaluation of complex sites.
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Step one is to lay out the terraced wall geometries and use AB Walls to evaluate the structure from both an internal and external perspective. Step two allows for exporting of the walls, reinforcement geometry, and layout to ReSSA for an overall global stability review.
This upgrade will be available in the coming weeks by simply opening up AB Walls on your computer. Training is available via one-on-one tutorials, through our scheduled ABU Online, or by contacting your local Allan Block representative. If you do not have the software contact the Allan Block Engineering Department at (800) 899-5309 extension 3, or contact your local Allan Block representative. Don’t forget to use our 3D capabilities for any of your new or past designs. Seeing is believing.
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Did We Miss Someone? If you know someone at your company who doesn't want to miss out on this amazing newsletter, send them this email so they can sign-up for the AB Technical Newsletter here!
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