Comparative Analysis of Precast Construction and Conventional Construction of Small-scale Concrete Building in Terms of Cost

Abstract

Abstract: Building a house is one of the basic needs of humans. To build a house with high durability and low cost, engineer A.N.S. Kulasinghe introduced the pre-cast concrete technology in late 1940’s. According to past studies, National Engineering Research and Development (NERD) Centre precast items are used in housing and other constructions and those details were collected by literature review. Objective of this study is updating the cost effectiveness of pre-cast concrete construction of a small-scale building. Data were collected from the NERD Centre and few pre-stressed concrete yards during the months of June to July 2019 by using face-to-face interviews. After the analysis of obtained data, it was found that there were differences between the costs of items among pre-cast concrete technology and conventional concrete construction technology. Overall cost comparison was done to single story building and two story building separately using cost rates of conventional method and pre-cast method. The outcome of the analysis revealed that, 30% - 38% of cost effectiveness can be obtained using pre-cast methods for single story building and using those methods for two story building, 29% - 32% of cost effectiveness can be gained.