St. Paul’s Hospital Structural Strengthening

OVERVIEW

After experiencing a temporary outage, St. Paul’s Hospital announced that it would spend $1 million dollars toward a short-term remediation and development project prior to permanently upgrading the electrical system. This upgrade included the replacement of generators, transformers, automatic transfer switches, switchgear and other critical electrical components. A few locations in the electrical room where generators were installed required additional steel equivalent reinforcement to accommodate for the new ducts. Fyfe Company was contacted to provide a solution using the Tyfo® Fibrwrap® system.

The Tyfo® SCH-41 system (unidirectional carbon fibers) was selected to provide the reinforcement needed on the steel deficient slab. Due to many physical obstacles in the project, close on-site interaction with Fibrwrap Construction, the certified applicator, was crucial. Fibrwrap Construction was able to communicate effectively with Fyfe to provide the steel equivalent reinforcement and work around the obstacles without removal of any existing equipment.

When using alternatives such as the Tyfo® Fibrwrap® system, reinforcement for steel deficient structural members can be obtained using the most efficient methods without an increase in thickness.