Masonry Magazine April 1984 Page. 9
MASONRY RESEARCH
continued from page 7
Concurrent with this meeting was the IMI Research and Development Program Board meeting which included four MCAA representatives. Both the IMI Research Program Board and the Advisory Council to MRF determined that one research priority for the masonry industry was an investigation into the metal studs/brick veneer wall system. The Advisory Council recommended to the MRF Board of Directors that a Request For Proposals (RFP) be prepared and that the Foundation seek qualified researchers. The IMI R&D program board indicated its desire to support such a study.
A special committee of the MRF Advisory Council was chosen to be the monitoring committee for this project. The responsibility of the monitoring committee was to help develop the RFP, evaluate the proposals that came in, select one and recommend it to the MRF Board. Once the research began, their task was to continuously monitor the development of the project, advise the researchers, and do a final evaluation. One of the reasons for utilizing an MRF Advisory Council monitoring committee is so that the MRF Board of Directors can put some distance between themselves and the research projects so that the highest rate of credibility can be maintained.
After the research project was selected, the next step was for the technical people from MRF member organizations and the Advisory Council metal studs monitoring committee, chaired by William Lefkofsky, Advisory Council member and consulting engineer from Michigan, to draft the RFP.
RFPs Sent to Academic Institutions
Once drafted, the RFP was circulated to all members of the Advisory Council for their critique and recommendations. When it was ready, having been approved by the Advisory Council and by the MRF Board of Directors, including MCAA's George Miller, a copy of the RFP was sent to all architectural and engineering schools in the country. Additionally, advertisements were taken out in three leading engineering and architectural magazines. Numerous requests came in for the RFP and, by deadline time this past September, 19 proposals from academic institutions and engineering firms from around the country, and also from Australia, Canada and Israel, had been received.
These proposals were shipped to the Advisory Council monitoring committee for review. The committee met approximately three weeks later and spent a full day in our offices in Washington reviewing and evaluating the proposals. Late in the afternoon the MRF Board of Directors met with the monitoring committee and heard their recommendation.
The competition for the project was very stiff. A number of excellent firms and universities had proposed, and the monitoring committee unanimously recommended the project presented by the University of Texas for testing of both the structural and corrosion aspects of the problem.
Now it happened that the University of Texas proposed a project that would cost more than $500,000, which was something we were not quite prepared to finance. After some deliberation, a meeting was arranged between the representatives from the research staff at the University of Texas, the MRF Board of Directors and the monitoring committee. It took another day to seek clarifications and modifications of the proposal, as well to try and negotiate the price down. It was not dissimilar from a collective bargaining session!
At any rate, the University of Texas researchers went back home to rewrite the proposal. Once received, copies of the proposal will be sent to the Board members and monitoring committee for their review. The Board will determine its position and another negotiating session will be set up.
One of the goals sought by MRF is to find others to cost-share some of the research projects. As you can see, our $65,000 doesn't go very far if we fund projects completely by ourselves. In my last conversation with the people from the University of Texas, they were going to break the proposal into two parts. One part will be submitted to the National Science Foundation, while the other section will come back to us.
Additional Projects Being Studied
Other projects being conducted by the Research Foundation include a study on the bond of brick to mortar at Clemson University in South Carolina. This was a $56,000 project, and will be completed by June of this year. The IMI R&D program is helping fund this study, and the MCAA members of that Board have expressed the hope that the study will yield data that can be used to develop mortar specifications for different masonry units.
Another study is being conducted at the University of Florida on composite wall structure. That is a three-year project; the first year has been completed and there are two years to go. It's a $300,000-plus project to which the Foundation has committed $75,000, and the principal investigator has sought additional funding from the National Science Foundation. We have yet to hear on that.
Also, by this summer we expect to have completed a masonry bibliography. This will be a comprehensive document which lists all of the materials on masonry research continued on page 30
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MASONRY-MARCH/APRIL, 1984 9