Industrial floor faults caused by volume changes in concrete and subsoil: case study

Abstract

Large floors of industrial enterprises, warehouses, stores, and shopping centres are quite heavily loaded with production technologies, transport mechanisms, stored material or shelf stackers. Regarding simple reinforcement and construction, industrial floors have been used in recent decades mainly reinforced with fibres from so-called fibre-reinforced concrete. Most slab failures are caused by extreme loads on the unbearable subsoil, a small amount of fibres, or by the shrinkage of concrete due to insufficient structural design of sliding, shrinking and expansion joints. Recently, however, in several constructions, structural failures have occurred caused by a volume-unstable subsoil in the form of a mixture of slag or metallurgical debris. The article deals with some failures of fibre concrete floors in practice, their methods of diagnostics and laboratory analysis of samples. The results are supplemented by practical examples of floor failures with respect to their origin.