Precast concrete sandwich panels offer numerous benefits, including insulation, durability, and fire resistance. Because they can be made using a high percentage of recycled materials and erected quickly with minimal site disturbance, they can also be major contributors toward construction of cost-efficient, sustainable structures. The result of Fabcon’s latest efforts is VersaCore+Green™, a sandwich panel introduced in March, 2007. The new panels have over 50% recycled content by volume and deliver the highest insulation values in the company’s 37 year history.

Moment-curvature plots and moment-axial force interaction diagrams are essential tools for understanding the load-deformation behavior of structural elements. To make the use of these tools simpler, a user-friendly spreadsheet-based program was created that can generate moment-curvature plots and moment-axial force interaction diagrams for reinforced concrete sections. These plots can include the effects of confinement provided by transverse reinforcement on the stress-strain relationship of concrete. The spreadsheet contains a series of macros written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and can be downloaded for free with the electronic version of this article.