Level Best Concrete Flooring, Yorkshire’s leading concrete flooring contractors, has recently completed the design and construction of a jointless steel fibre reinforced cast insitu warehouse concrete floor slab on the outskirts of Bradford, West Yorkshire. The concrete floor slab was fully suspended from steel tubular piles infilled with a C40 concrete complete with a 600mm diameter pile cap to support the steel fibre reinforced concrete floor. Level Best Concrete flooring, in conjunction with Tim Stower & Partners designed a 250mm deep concrete floor with 35kg/m3 of Bekaert 5D steel fibres and no ancillary steel fabric mesh reinforcement. Underfloor insulation was required to increase the thermal values of the building, this also increased complications during the slab casting process. Level Best overcame the problem of insulation directly under the floor slab by utilising 4 concrete buggies to discharge the steel fibre reinforced concrete onto the working platform. The concrete was the laid using the Ligchine laser screed which is the ideal remote controlled laser screed to achieve the flatness tolerance of FM3 2013 edition of TR34 and to evenly compact the concrete to a suitable standard.
The project was a new warehouse extension to the clients premises and required great thought and detailing to create an interface between floor slabs and take out the deviation in levels between the two buildings. Level Best installed permanent steel joints at various different levels between doorways to create a smooth transition and allow fork lifts traffic movements. The joints meant the concrete flooring contractors could cast all of the separate areas in one day as the concrete could be poured directly through the “leave in place” construction joint system.
Steel fibres were integrated and controlled on site using the conveyor system, which hooks up to a generator and allows Level Best to control the integration of the steel fibres and also add superplasticiser to increase the workability of the concrete once the fibres have been added. Concrete deliveries to site were excellently organised by local independent supplier Huddersfield readymix, part of the Myers Group. Eight cubic metre mixers were used to minimise traffic movements on the site as the snow had left the site water logged and very boggy.
Following completion the concrete pouring the Level Best concrete finishing team began applying the quartz dry shake topping the surface of the concrete floor slab. Using a mobile topping spreader the natural coloured dry shake was applied uniformly @ 3kg/m2. The dry shake not only increases the abrasion resistance of the floor surface but also helps to supress any steel fibres left visible. Once the dry shake was fully bonded to the concrete and left with a polished concrete surface, the slab was spray cured with a Sika Proseal curing agent and compound.
should you like to know more information about the concrete flooring solutions Level Best Concrete Flooring has available, then please contact us on 01405 819199 or e mail enquiries@levelbestconcreteflooring.co.uk
We have lots of information on steel fibre jointless floor slab designs and also the more common steel fabric mesh design solutions.
