The Slab Designer
Articles and technical papers that go back to the original references, assumptions, and calculations behind slab-on-ground design guidance. Every topic has a short article for owners, developers, and contractors, and a technical paper for engineers. Free to read, cite, and download as PDF.
24 results
A century of pavement design organized around the problems that drove it, set alongside the development of slabs-on-ground.
How each pavement problem produced a fix, how floors borrowed the theory, and where floors now lag the roads.
Proposes organizing slab guidance around physical design levers so new systems are evaluated as engineering, not products.
Industrial floors innovated without an industry program behind them. The guidance hasn't kept up.
Shows how load transfer, curl, support stiffness, and surface demands, not thickness alone, govern slab performance.
Why the thickest slab is often the least engineered one, and what the roads learned when they measured it.
Audits eight design decisions in ACI 360R-10 for whether each issue raised is carried through to a design method.
A new engineer follows ACI 360R-10 step by step and finds the places it raises an issue and stops.
Traces how PCA added a joint factor in 2001 and 2008 that ACI 360R-10's thickness procedure still omits.
What owners should know about the trap built into the industry's main slab design guide.
Compares CBR-to-k correlations with a calibrated elastic layered method and evaluates the SSI long-term k-value approach.
Where 'CBR 3 = k 100 psi/in.' came from, why a settlement-reduced k-value isn't a stiffness, and who should own long-term settlement.
Checks the Fig. 6.6 joint spacing and the Table 5.2 factor of safety against the guide's own curling and fatigue data.
The guide says its joint spacing keeps curl low and its factor of safety covers the rest. Its own numbers say otherwise.
Mechanistic-empirical design and contractor cost survey for one spec warehouse with three joint details.
The joint detail changes how thick a spec building slab needs to be, and the cost numbers say doweling pays.
Shows the section-level solution behind the 0.1% limit does not address force transfer across a joint or redistribution of opening.
The 0.1% limit for continuous steel through sawcuts rests on a table that answers a different question than the joints ask.
Thickness tolerances push as-built steel ratios past 0.1%, and the highway record of JRCP shows where that detail leads.
Light steel through the joints has a name in highway engineering, and most DOTs stopped building it decades ago.
Validates a rebuild of PCA's 1973 airport method and explains why its flexible inputs do not make it an industrial floor design basis.
Why an airport design method ended up sizing forklift floors, and why matching inputs is not the same as matching the problem.
Summarizes the 2026 Concrete International and Concrete articles that set out why the Westergaard and Meyerhof methods fall short for modern floors and how the SLABS framework addresses it.
A plain-language summary of our Concrete International and Concrete articles, and why, in our rack example, the highest stress is where the legacy methods don't look.