At the conception stage of an industrial concrete floor we must consider two basic elements of design; Structural and detailed.

Structural design is the mechanism we follow which results in the slab thickness and the reinforcement requirement. We use well founded formula to achieve this goal. The Concrete Society’s Technical Report 34 (TR34), being one such design guide but with the benefit of not being prescriptive.

The constituents that make up detailed design however are best described as an art and bourn out of experience. Joint detailing, build ability, joint locations, the performance based specification results in the floor that the end user runs his business on, ‘the work bench’. Get the detail design right, the end user has a system floor that will perform with little maintenance to the floor or the materials handling equipment (MHE) running on it. Get it wrong, the end user will find himself facing increasing maintenance costs to the floor and MHE, not to mention increased operational costs generally.

The road to a good design will balance methods of construction and materials against design, cost and performance requirements and on this road compromises may have to be made. For example, asking for a ‘Superfalt’ floor, with no joints, steel fibre reinforced with a bright colour dry shake topping is testing the flooring industry to it’s limits and unlikely to be achievable.