Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm here today with Claude Goguen. Claude is a civil engineer from Canada and works for the national precast concrete association, a trade association representing precast concrete manufacturers throughout North America.
He's been with NPCA for 14 years and mainly works on training and outreach. So Claude, welcome to the show.
Claude Goguen: Thank you very much for having me.
Lisa Ryan: So share a little about your background and what led you to do what you're doing with NPCA.
Claude Goguen: I graduated with a civil engineering degree in Moncton, New Brunswick, this little town on the east end of Canada. And it was poor timing for me for graduation because the local economy was in a bit of a rough shape. So I expanded my job search and got hired by a precast manufacturing company in Columbus, Indiana. So I packed my Chevy cavalier at the time and drove 30 hours Southwest to a new land of new opportunities.
And I ended up working there for ten years or so and then worked for general contractors and developers in Indianapolis, staying in Indiana. And finally, I ended up back in precast, where NPCA hired me in 2008.
Lisa Ryan: wow. So what is it that you like best about precast? What's kept you in the industry for so long?
Claude Goguen: Good question. I love concrete. I've always since I've been in construction. I've loved working with concrete, and precast concrete is a great industry because we get to make these amazing things out of concrete and then let them cure, and you can ship them out. It's almost like making art pieces, even for a manhole, sewer, or things. But just the idea and working with members and manufacturers have been a great industry from both sides. I've been on the precaster side and also on the association side. And it is a growing industry. It's something that even though concrete's been around for such a long time and seems such an ancient construction material, the technology behind concrete and the increasing new technologies that are coming out are so exciting. So it's still an evolving material in a sense. So I gravitate toward that.
Lisa Ryan: And especially since you're talking about concrete being the number two most used material resource on the planet with water being number one. And you said it'd been around forever. So what are you seeing in these new technologies that are super cool?
Claude Goguen: In a world of admixtures, these chemicals that they put in the concrete. Concrete is cement, water, and aggregates. From time to time, some of us will make our own concrete to put a fence post in or something like that in the backyard.
And that's still what's used today, except for the cement. The cementitious material varies more and more. You've got your regular Portland cement, and then you've got other types of cementitious materials. Some of them that are from another industry. They're waste from a different industry, coal or steel manufacturing. The chemicals they're making that make the concrete do one thing or another, either in its fresh state or hardened state, are just amazing.
And now, they are looking at concrete on a nanoscale. They study how to alter its properties and make it even better and more durable on a nanoscale. If I were to tell you that a nanometer is about my hair growing, my hair grows about a nanometer a second. So that gives you an idea of how small a nanometer is, and they are studying concrete on that smaller scale. And then 3d printing of concrete they're working on, and new things are always coming up.
Lisa Ryan: Wow. So what are they printing? I saw one of those home shows where they printed houses out of concrete. So what other things are they printing out of
