Comparative study and decision making for a formwork technique to be adopted on a construction site in mumbai

Abstract

To address the housing and transportation requirements of an exponentially increasing population, Indian construction industry has grown by leaps and bounds. Thus with the globalization of Indian economy & introduction of multinational companies in India for construction activities, it has become imperative to have precise & speedy construction projects. Conventional construction methods are not able to cope with the demand of infrastructural facilities with high degree of quality control & assurance. No doubt, conventional methods prove to be economical, but they fail in providing required number of dwellings in time; hence latest construction technologies by applying fast-track construction is the only remedy left to address this issue. Formwork is an important part of construction and it takes 25-30 % of total cost of construction. Thus with the use of new technologies in formwork, construction permits casting of larger elements in a single pour, which reduces time and labour requirement as compared to conventional methods. Thus, the various new systems have promised to achieve overall economy with faster as well as high quality construction. In this paper, an attempt is made to have a comparative study of established conventional formwork technology with a set of new formwork techniques, which are currently not used much in Indian construction industry; and hence suggest which method is superior for the construction project under consideration.