Alabniah is the new flagship factory for precast concrete in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is the most advanced and largest – 23,000 m2 covered production area built on a total of 112,000 m2 – plant of its kind in the area. Tekla Structures BIM software was used to model and build the production facilities and will be used in the future to efficiently produce and deliver a wide range of precast components and complete building systems for the growing market.
The analysis and planning phase for the new factory resulted in high-automated production processes to reduce manpower requirements and allow for better control over delivery schedules and product quality. Furthermore, it was a requirement of Alabniah to implement European standards to provide a good and safe working environment, which again has direct impact on the product quality. The construction period involved companies such as Radicon Gulf Consult, a multi-discipline consulting firm for building and infrastructure design, Arcon as the general contractor for the construction works, and Zamil Steel responsible for the design and provision of the steel superstructure. Internet-based document handling and project meetings held on a regular basis ensured that the design process went through quickly.
The Alabniah Precast Concrete Buildings Factory encompasses a pallet circulation system system delivered by Tekla partner Unitechnik, Vollert and Weckenmann for the production of solid walls, sandwich walls, lattice girder floor slabs and double walls. Reinforcement preparation is done with a fully-automated mesh welding machine, lattice girder welding machine, link bender, shear line for rebar, mesh cutting and mesh bending devices, and cage assembly area. There is a special elements area for pre-stressed double T-slabs, pre-stressed beams up to 40 m length, columns including foundation, and stairs and other volumetric products, and a line for hollow core slabs up to 500 mm thickness.
Full integration of all factory components into the IT concept was an essential requirement for the factory. Robots, concrete spreader, and mesh and lattice girder welding machines are fed with production data created in the Alabniah engineering department with Tekla Structures software, which allows for a quick design process and ensures that all panels required will fit together. All reinforcement and connection details between the panels and all built-in parts are modeled. When design is completed and all collision checks and quality control routines have been carried out, the designs are exported into CAM files in the Unitechnik format 6.0. This is the standard interface description between the design software and the machines in the precast factory. The design packages also comprise the work documents for the factory staff in PDF format, as well as material lists for material procurement and preparation purposes.
The production process starts in the shuttering robot which paces the shutters according to element-specific computer data for each single element produced in the factory. The robot works over two-pallet positions. The layout allows continuous working of the shuttering robot without standstill times caused by pallet changeover processes. The shutters for solid and sandwich walls are provided by a separate storage robot, which places theme on a conveyor belt for the next pallets, feeding the shutters into the shuttering robot area. After the shuttering robot has completed a pallet by placing the shutters and plotting the additional required information, the pallets are transported to the stations for manual completion of formwork. Upon arrival of a pallet at the manual workstation, the pallet occupation sheet showing arrangement of elements on the pallet together with basic element data and single element sheets with detailed information of the single elements are printed online and automatically from the printer installed at the manual workstations. From the shuttering robot the pallets are distributed according to preset priorities into three different production lines.
Saudi Arabian construction industry is consuming huge quantities of hollow core slabs. To benefit from this demand, Alabniah has installed a hollow core production line with 6 beds of 150 m length and the possibility to extend the factory building for another bay sufficient to install of up to 8 additional beds of 150 m length. Tekla-compatible Elematic equipment is used for the hollow core production, specified to produce slabs of up to 500 mm thickness. The Alabniah Precast Concrete Buildings Factory is starting up exactly at the right time to supply for one of the most vital markets of precast concrete products worldwide. On top of this, the Saudi Arabian government has launched a number of huge infrastructure projects including schools, universities, and hospitals, generating a perfect market for the factory.
A summary of an article by Markus Obinger (Prilhofer Consulting) published in CPI (Concrete Plant International) 2 I 2010
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