Factory floors and foundations in Dubai Investments Park

The factory slab carries the business

Production lines, racking and forklifts all sit on the ground slab. Uneven settlement or cracked joints stop machines, so the design focuses on subgrade preparation, thickness and joints. On the concrete side we supply a fibre-reinforced mix for better crack control and surface toughness, at a consistent slump so the power-float crew can finish each bay evenly.

Heavy machines often need their own isolated bases, cast separately from the floor so vibration does not travel. Those bases use the substructure mix and should be cured wet for the days specified.

Warehouse slabs also take the base plates of steel portal frames. Those column pads are poured before the floor, in the substructure mix, and the floor joints are planned around them.

Residential clusters

The housing side is a conventional concrete frame: footings or a raft, columns, beams and slabs. DIP is inland, and the foundation design is driven by load more than by salt, though the exposure class on the drawings always applies. We keep separate batches for columns and slabs when the specification asks for different grades.

Cluster housing often repeats the same block several times. Keeping the same mix design across blocks makes cube results comparable and the formwork cycle predictable.

Volumes, distance and heat

A 2,000 m² warehouse floor at 200 mm thick is 400 m³, roughly 34 trucks. That is a multi-day programme in bays, best poured at night in summer. DIP is about 17 km from our Al Quoz plant, reached by Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Road or Expo Road, and each load is retarded for the trip. Office and mezzanine floors then take a screed to level.