BUILDINGS

As Materials Consultants Asia and its subsidiaries, we commenced building inspections and testing in the early 80’s, using both NDT and physical testing systems to determine the serviceability of buildings and some notable buildings assessed in this way were the Raffles Hotel , Law Courts, National Library and other significant and Historic buildings in Singapore.

In Hong Kong and with the aging of the Government Housing problems MCL was part of a very large NDT assessment program and the results indicated that some NDT tests were good such as the “Pundit”, with UPV testing and the half cell surveys to detect the corrosion of the reinforcement.

What none of this type of testing revealed was the load carrying capacity of the foundations and as important the load capability of the floors of the buildings. In the late 80’s and into the 90’s the now Integrity Testing Pty. Ltd initiated a system of using the Mod-Shock and DBTS testing to determine not only the serviceability but the load carrying capacity of the foundations and the floors and nominated it as the IBAP (The Integrity Building Assessment Programme), see the introduction below and go via this web site to the “The Rehabilitation of buildings the Integrity way” for a full description of the system.

For Australia, we carried out this system on a number of small historic buildings, but the first really large project was the refurbishment of the timber Woolloommooloo jetty in Sydney, followed closely by the Myers and David Jones 100 year old concrete buildings in Melbourne.

Our extensive projects for buildings is quite large and varied from Historical Buildings like the State Library in Melbourne to Skyscrapers with 30 floors, such as the AMP towers in Sydney and we give some photographic examples in this section on the buildings.