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Flooring is one of the most important components of any building's functionality, whether residential or commercial. However, industrial flooring is different from a residential building’s flooring on the grounds of strength and durability. It is required to be stronger and more durable to support the movement of heavy equipment.

The function of an industrial floor is to provide trouble free movement of man, machine, materials and material-handling equipment. Other than the stated obvious functions, floors are often called upon to provide:

- Hygienic/Anti-bacterial (Seamless, joint-less)

- Highly Cleanable (cold water, hot-water, steam, disinfectants etc.)

- Wear (Abrasion) Resistant.

- Chemical Resistant. (acids, alkalis, solvents)

- Resistance from Impact and Static Loading.

- Ease of Maintenance.

- Anti-slip/Anti-stain properties

- Flammability and Fire Safety.

- Scratch/Scuff resistance

Conventional industrial flooring techniques, plain or reinforced concrete, no matter how good it is, has several deficiencies in its properties as a structural material for industrial floors. All plain and reinforced concrete;-dusts, shrinks, cracks, chips and spalls; corrodes, stains, gets wet, transmits damp and moisture, harbours bacteria and germs; requires joints, in effect, “breaking” up a floor into smaller pieces. The joints become another, separate, on-going problem altogether (chipping, dusting, erosion, cleaning, etc.).

Vacuum Dewatering, Seamless and Prestressed concrete industrial flooring technologies are available in the market to overcome the deficiencies of conventional plain concrete industrial floors and fulfil the trouble free functional requirements.

Vacuum Dewatering Concrete Flooring

Usually, the deficiencies like drying shrinkage, excess water in mix, improper grade/thickness control, poor finishing and curing techniques, and excessive load on the concrete are noticed in conventional flooring during its service period. To overcome the deficiencies of conventional concrete flooring, a system is devised to improve the properties of such concrete floors. The system by virtue of its uniqueness is known as vacuum dewatering concrete in which surplus water (or excess water) from fresh concrete is removed to improve strength, durability, and other properties of concrete by reducing the water-cement ratio (to the optimum level) immediately after the mix is placed, usually in floors and other flooring purposes.

The Vacuum Dewatering Flooring (VDF) system, also known as Tremix or Trimix flooring,   is an effective technique used to overcome this contradiction of opposite requirements of workability and high strength. With this technique, both these workability and high strength are possible at the same time. The system is workable for laying high quality concrete floors with superior cost effectiveness to achieve high strength, durability, longer Life, better finish and faster work.

Adopting the Vacuum Dewatered Flooring method facilitates use of concrete with better workability than what is normally possible. A lowered water to cement ratio due to vacuum dewatering leads to improvement in each of the properties of concrete like compressive strength, wear resistance, abrasion resistance, less shrinkage and minimum water permeability. Through the vacuum treatment, it is possible to reduce the water content in the concrete by 15-25% which greatly increase the compressive strength. By lowering the water-cement ratio, the tendency of shrinkage and subsequent cracking is greatly reduced. VDF’s are uniform homogeneous floor with high flatness accuracy. VDF achieves high early strength minimising damage on newly cast floors.

Seamless Flooring

Traditionally, saw cut grade slabs and expansion joints have been predominantly used for industrial flooring applications. However, with the recent advances in flooring reinforcement and construction technologies, it has become possible to completely eliminate saw cuts and expansion joints from flooring and achieve a floor without joints, i.e. a seamless floor. One of the best approaches to floor construction without any saw-cut and expansion joints is by the way of construction of seamless floors.

Seamless Floors are floor systems where the entire floor area (irrespective of the floor plate size and length: width aspect ratio) are finished without any saw-cut or expansion joints whatsoever.

Seamless floors cater to a wide variety of industrial applications. They are definitely preferable in a heavy duty industrial environment where there is a lot of forklift movement, where there is a certain amount of flatness requirement that needs to be maintained (as more discontinuities in the form of saw cuts hamper the floor flatness), in heavily loaded areas where the possibility of wear and tear for floors is high, and also in floors where a certain degree of hygiene needs to be maintained. For such applications listed above, saw cut floors have been found to be prone to maintenance problems. These issues extend not only to floors (repeated repair of joint spalls, filling of joints, grinding etc.) but also the equipment used on them (such as forklifts, cranes etc.). These have often been known to affect the productivity of the manufacturing processes on the floor.

A totally seamless concrete floor with no opening construction joints results in higher operational efficiency, virtually eliminating concrete floor slab repair maintenance and reduces the life cost of the building.

Prestressed Concrete Flooring

Prestressed concrete is a revolution in the field of industrial floor construction. It introduces a whole new concept of quality and a professional approach to concrete construction. With prestressed concrete planning and execution, problems and subsequent dilatation problems are thing of the past

In ordinary reinforced cement concrete, compressive stresses are taken up by concrete and tensile stresses by steel alone. The concrete below the neutral axis is ignored since it is weak in tension. Although steel takes up the tensile stresses, the concrete in the tensile zone develops minute cracks. The load carrying capacity of such concrete sections can be increased if steel and concrete both are stressed before the applications of external loads. This is the concept of prestressed concrete. Prestresssed concrete is that concrete in which internal stresses of suitable magnitude are introduced so that the stresses resulting from the external loadings can be counteracted to a desired degree. In R.C.C. members, prestress induced is of compressive nature so that it balances the tensile stresses produced due to external load. It makes the whole section effective (the concrete area in the tension zone also) in resisting loads.

Prestressing removes a number of design limitations which conventional concrete places on span and load and permits the building of industrial floors with longer unsupported spans. This allows architects and engineers to design and build lighter and shallower concrete floors without sacrificing strength. Prestressing is active against loads caused by the use, environmental influences, shrinkage and interaction with the subsoil. Prestressing is designed for the worst load situation to avoid the tensile failure in concrete and introduction the pressure load in correct time before creation of shrinkage cracks. This completely prevents failure in concrete unlike other ways of crack control, which are based on increasing of passive reinforcement for limiting crack width according to certain requirements.

With prestressing technology it is possible to design very large area without the expansion joints. Expansion joints are often the epicentre of the failure of the floor structures. Their elimination leads to financial savings on maintenance costs. Apart from the cost savings, it also achieves the material savings because with prestressed technology, it is possible to design floors with a thickness upto 30% smaller than with commonly used solution.