Durable floors make better warehouses
Ritesh Jain, Chief Executive Officer, Lamba Techno Flooring Solutions, shares his view on the importance of warehouse flooring in handling loads and what needs to be done to ensure they remain durable.
High-end flooring solutions become the need of the hour as against normal saw-cut floors such as the jointless ones
Today’s modern 3PL warehouses are not just storage godowns; they have transformed to smart storage spaces enclosing bigger areas to a tune of 10,000 to 50,000 sqm (also going vertically up), with 24x7 operations that include storage, packaging, and delivery to end-clients. This calls for proper designing of imposed loads and accounting for impact of sophisticated Material Handling Equipment (MHE) that operates on the floor. Resultantly, high-end flooring solutions become the need of the hour as against normal saw-cut floors such as the jointless ones.
Jointless floors are those constructed in large panels which typically measure 25x25 sqm without intermediate or control shrinkage joints and fine tolerance surface finish - Free Movement (FM 2) - as per international standards TR-34 from the UK Concrete Society. These are constructed by us using cuttingedge technology of laying concrete floors with laser screeds. The word ‘jointless’ can be misleading, as there is a practical upper limit to the area of concrete that can be placed in a single continuous operation. No joints are sawn, but steel fibres in the concrete mix control the width and distribution of cracks caused by shrinkage.
A benefit of jointless floors to the building user is the opportunity of having relatively large areas of floor with no joints. Normally, it is an SFRC with a higher dosage of steel fibres, say 30-45 kg/m3 depending upon the design, with higher thickness of slab which may be up to 225 mm.
Subsequently, to meet operational requirements, surface treatment is carried out on concrete floors by making use of liquid densifiers and polishing is also done. This increases the abrasion resistance of the wearing surface and prevents dust generation.
(The views expressed are solely of the author. The publication may or may not subscribe to the same.)