Business as Normal While Geobear Shores Up Sinking Floors Sponsored Feature

Buildings are heavy, and sometimes the weight of all that steel and concrete is too much to bear. A sinking floor, cracking wall or misaligned racking can bring a business to a halt while the facility is stabilised. Traditional fixes are slow and expensive, but the use of innovative technologies can shore up a building with a minimum of disruption.

London-based Geobear, a global leader in the stabilisation and re-levelling of large facility floors, injects an innovative construction material called geopolymer into ground that has become unstable. With its main operations across Europe and China, the company has deployed its pioneering geopolymer technology in more than 200,000 residential, commercial and industrial projects around the world.

When a concrete slab has sunk due to voids in the ground, or settled due to a weight burden, Geobear offers technical solutions that can be employed with a minimal impact on business operations. The process requires no major construction or excavation work and it can be completed incrementally, meaning only a small area of a floor needs to be closed off at any one time. Crucially, this means that businesses can continue as normal while Geobear methodically moves across a site to stabilise or lift the floor.

Shoring Up an E-Commerce Warehouse

Geobear solutions are applicable to all kinds of real estate, wherever a floor is sinking, from hotels to factories and from logistic centres to supermarkets. The company’s rapid, non-disruptive solutions are especially valued by e-commerce players, where continuous warehouse and logistics management can be thwarted by subsidence problems in busy warehouses.

A 26,000 square metre warehouse operated by a leading Chinese e-commerce firm suffered from ground subsidence, affecting its operational efficiency and placing both business and employees in danger. In order to ensure the warehouse continued its logistics operations in the run-up to a shopping festival, the company had to solve the ground subsidence issue within 50 days. Three solutions were available in practice: To do nothing and accept the growing risks; to go for a grouting/piling solution; or to explore the potential of geopolymer injection.

As the subsidence issue needed to be solved without closing the warehouse, only the Geobear geopolymer injection remained as a viable option. Traditional grouting or piling solutions would have required the warehouse activity to be moved to another location, followed by heavy construction machinery operation and floor rebuilding, lasting a total of several months. The lost business would have incurred enormous costs.

Geobear offered a unique non-disruptive ground improvement solution to meet the demanding timeline. The desired results were achieved by drilling 12 millimetre holes into the ground followed by a geopolymer injection underground which improved the foundation bearing capacity, as well as re-levelling the floor – all to within a millimetre tolerance. The project was completed in only 40 days, without any significant interruption to the warehouse operation or customer deliveries.

By harnessing Geobear’s advanced technology, clients can keep their business running at all hours. Geobear saved the Chinese e-commerce player nearly six months of business, ensuring that customers could receive their deliveries on time.

Geopolymers Coming to a Real Estate Asset Near You

Geobear commonly works on sites that have high racking and use autonomous machines to move goods. The impact on racking alignment from even a slight movement in the floor levels is increased with the height, and in some cases machines have been known to fail. Geobear uses precise laser monitoring to ensure that the floor is brought back to within a 0.25 millimetre tolerance, thus enabling the continued use of autonomous machines.

The options for a busy site to deal with uneven floors are limited. Any ceasing of operations will have a large impact on the bottom line, which is why the major facility owners choose Geobear to implement a solution. Geobear’s dust-free methods enabling the firm to work on any site and under any conditions. They also provide stabilisation and re-levelling to slabs outside facilities that are impacting vehicle movement, whilst they have also stabilised large rail based crane lifting machines.

The installation of mezzanine floors within existing facilities is becoming commonplace, but in many cases the existing floors or footings can not withstand the additional weight. Here, Geobear use an extremely dense material which allows such areas to withstand additional loads and thus allowing a facility to grow by using vertical space.

This sponsored feature was contributed by Geobear. To learn more about the company, please click here