The Enterprise Centre is a storage warehouse and industrial development in Artarmon by Austcorp Pty Ltd. The development has frontages on both Lanceley Place and Reserve Road. The ground floor and level 1 are used for the storage business 'Spare Room' and level 2 which is accessed from Reserve Rd supports the industrial units. Construction of the development took place in two stages using two different construction teams.

Unique to this project was a requirement for level 1 to be a 4 hour fire rated floor, have a load capacity of up to 14 kPa, suspended 6m above the ground floor and to be totally demountable. This presented a challenge that only precast construction could answer.

The consulting engineers for stage one Van Der Meer Bonser, in consultation with Hanson, designed a system to provide the solution. Precast inverted tee beams 1000 wide by 700 deep were used as primary beams. These supported 300 thick hollowcore floor planks that spanned the 7 metres between beams. The entire system was erected without the need for any temporary support for the beams or floor planks and no structural topping was used. The joints were grouted with a sand cement mix to finish the floor.

Stage 1 of this unique floor was made up of 783 precast elements with the erection taking just 18 days. An average of 43 elements per day was installed with a 160 tonne mobile crane. The success of stage 1 assured continuation of this design into stage 2. A total of 12,500 m2 of demountable flooring was supplied.

In the permanent applications, hollowcore flooring with insitu concrete topping was used for the bridging slab linking Reserve Road to the development and also for the mezzanine floors in the structural steel framed industrial units.

Stage 2 also incorporated over 2,500m2 of hollowcore walling into the design. The hollowcore panels provide a cheaper and faster option to the solid precast walls originally designed. These walls were used as cladding from the ground floor up to the underside of level 2, a height of up to 12 metres in some locations. During construction the wall panels were temporarily cantilevered past level 1 by up to 6m until the level 2 floor was poured and tied the walls into the structure. This allowed the wall panels to be installed along with the demountable flooring, reducing overall costs and simplifying the connection detail of the wall panels to the level 2 slab.

The application of precast in this project demonstrates versatility and flexibility can be provided whilst still maintaining time and cost-effective solutions for building.

Contact Details

To discuss whether we can assist you contact our estimating manager.

Phone: 02 9627 2666

Fax: 02 9627 5161

Email: precast@hanson.biz