Applications of Raised Floors

Music Hall, Dresden

Sony Center, Berlin

The reliability and simplicity of raised floor construction makes it indispensable for use in banks, office buildings, equipment and control rooms, and other places where there are high demands placed on the installed equipment.

The principle of construction is primarily used for IT-rooms, transformer stations, offices, and wherever quick and simple access to the entire installation is required. They are also great for installation in full office and business operations.

A raised floor is a system consisting of panels and supports. Each panel is carried by the supports and may be opened to gain access to the space under the floor.

In addition to electrical installations which can be accommodated under the raised floor, water, waste water, pneumatic tube conveyors, compressed air, central vacuum cleaning systems, etc. can also be accommodated in this way.

A special advantage of raised floors is that they can also handle air-conditioning tasks, such as ventilation via air diffusers or, for high ventilation requirements, ventilation and airflow via ventilation panels.

Raised floors are made up of two main parts:
a) A substructure consisting only of pedestals of different lengths, design and loading capacity, or of pedestals in combination with stringers.
b) Raised floor carrier panels made of various materials and floor coverings in a grid of 600 x 600 mm (23.6” x 23.6”) (customized sizes also available upon request).

Raised floor is used for interior design in trade centers and office buildings of well-known companies such as the Sony Center in Berlin, Microsoft in Munich, and other cultural and industrial buildings. Among the most famous are the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Reichstag and Bundeskanzleramt in Berlin.

Minnesota supercomputer center

Computer Rooms
Access floors were designed specifically for computer rooms. There are several reasons why:

Most computer centers have a surface covering known as High Pressure Laminate (HPL). HPL has become the standard in computer room design because of its ease of maintenance and its unique ability to dissipate static electricity. HPL is available in two different thicknesses: 1/16" and 1/8".
If you have heavy loads, you will definitely want to consider an all-steel, concrete-filled floor. These floors offer excellent protection for rolling loads as well as for stationary equipment. Another important consideration is the understructure. We have found that, in the case of heavy loads, bolting the grid creates a much safer environment. Bolting the stringers to the pedestal creates a grid that remains rigid even when floor tiles are removed.

Office

General Office Environment
At one time, when a mainframes did all the processing for a company, the employees had merely a typewriter and a calculator. With the advent of mini-computers, terminals, and pc’s, the landscape of the modern office was forever changed. One plug at our desk is no longer sufficient. Today we need a strip...make that two strips. With a minimum requirement of one pc at every desk, the wires in an office quickly became unmanageable and uncontrollable. This does not even take into account the moving of employees throughout a building, along with their wires, their phones, their faxes, their Ethernet cabling, or modem, etc. Yesterday’s design is a nightmare in the office of today.

The raised floor is the floor of tomorrow in today’s offices. Its loading requirements are usually not as high as computer room floors, and it has contemporary carpet on its surface.

Usually, these general office floors are lighter and less expensive than mainframe-type computer floors. Further, if the building can accommodate raised floors during the design and construction of the building, the owner of the building will enjoy thousands of dollars in savings throughout the life of the building. Installing access floors during remodeling is also quite common. If you are constructing a building, the best way to guarantee the future of your building is to install access floors. Because the future will bring more sophisticated equipment to your desktop, you must plan for these unknowns in the best way you can. Access floors are a smart decision and a wise investment.

Equipment room

Equipment Rooms
Equipment Rooms are typically defined as areas that have limited human access. Operators do not sit in these rooms, equipment does. Usually equipment rooms have limited traffic and the concern for these rooms is heavy loads, not rolling loads. The weight of the equipment that will be placed on the floor will determine the type of floor that is best suited for your application. There are several types of the raised floors; each has a different loading capacity so that you can choose the one which is the most suitable for your needs.

The loading capacity of the raised floor is defined through tests and calculations; the results of which should be confirmed by certificates of compliance with standards DIN EN 12825.

When choosing a raised floor covering for an equipment room, one must make certain that the coating material and manner of adhesion meet certain requirements (conductivity, antistatic, etc).


Control Rooms
Years ago, when plants were operated by switches and hydraulics, the Control Room was a very low-tech environment.

Once the equipment became more advanced (processor-driven), the control room environment changed drastically. Out went the valves, gauges, and levers, and in came the monitors, keyboards and processors. With this new technology came the need to keep the environment cleaner and more stable.

Access floors have become an industry standard in application in control room environments where the need to manage wiring and static is critical. Raised floors offer flexibility in this environment, creating the most efficient control rooms to manage control operations.

Control room (Thermal Power Station)

Control room (Hydroelectric Power Station)

There are several reasons to choose a raised floor in a Control Room:

Most control rooms have a surface covering known as High Pressure Laminate (HPL). HPL has become the standard in control room design because of its ease of maintenance and its unique ability to dissipate static electricity. HPL is available in two different thicknesses: 1/16” and 1/8”. One benefit of HPL is that it is resistant to many chemicals that are found in industrial environments.

Carpet is not recommended in working chemical plants. If the floor is to be located inside a working plant, you will want to consider using a rigid grid-bolted stringer (cross-pieces) understructure system. If the grid snaps in place (snap on stringers), workers accessing under the floor often neglect to replace the floor components properly. Because of this, it is highly recommended that the grid be bolted in order to discourage workers from disassembling the floor system.

ISP room

Internet Service Providers
Internet Service Providers nationwide are growing at an unbelievable rate! So, too, are their terminal servers, their news servers, their mail servers, their web servers, servers they are co-locating, their modem pools, etc.

What initially began as a back-room operation has now become a central environment, with immediate demands for cooling and wire management. There is more cable per square foot in these facilities than any computer mainframe area. Cable is a way of life for an ISP. Because of this, raised floors have become an urgent necessity for many ISP’s in order to make room for the technicians.

Fortunately, most of these ISP’s can install used raised flooring that was previously installed in a mainframe computer room for a fraction of the cost. These floors usually do not have to be the finest quality unless the facility will also serve as a showroom.

Any used or lightweight floor is perfect for application as ISP flooring.

Clean room

Clean Rooms
Clean Rooms, as a rule, are used in medicine (X-ray departments, operating theaters, contagious isolation wards). They are typically found in hi-tech environments such as biomedical, microelectronic, pharmaceutical and laboratory facilities. In such rooms, special microbiological requirements and high air-purity must be maintained.

Clean Rooms are environments that must be completely clean; free from dust, dirt, and other particulates. The airflow is designed to carry microscopic particles down from the body, usually by a grated access floor. These floors are all-aluminum with a highly-specialized application. These floors are more expensive compared with mainframe type raised floors.

Some reasons why All Aluminum Access Floors are used in Clean Rooms are: