The Sunrise Senior Living Franklin Lakes project is your typical job site by every appearance. The 82-unit steel frame facility consists of two floors above a basement parking garage and spans 110,000 s/f. But there’s more to Franklin Lakes than meets the eye. Beneath the surface, a network of sensors is uploading concrete temperature and maturity data to the cloud in real-time.
At Franklin Lakes, Premier Concrete Systems and Wohlsen Construction Company partnered with Converge, a green construction tech company in the UK, to see how real-time concrete data monitoring could transform our job site. Converge, which is currently expanding to the US, develops AI-based technologies and sensors that digitize and optimize construction sites. With the intelligence gathered by the software and sensors at Franklin Lakes, Wohlsen sees a compelling opportunity to drive efficiency and sustainability across the entire portfolio. Onsite in New Jersey, Wohlsen project engineer Gerardo Reyes embedded 4 of Converge's sensors in each 12-inch pour, for a total of four sensors across the superstructure. Every sensor has a QR code, which is scanned into Converge’s ConcreteDNA software system.
“The sensors were very easy to set up and use and the support we had from Converge was excellent,” said Reyes. Each sensor takes continuous concrete temperature readings after a pour. A Bluetooth-enabled device with the Converge app can collect the sensor data wirelessly and transmit it to the cloud for Converge to process and return real-time concrete strength information. The platform can also be configured to notify devices whenever the concrete strength reaches key milestones.