The Arauco Grayling Particleboard Plant located in Northern MI will be one of the largest particleboard plants in the world upon completion. Additionally, the plant will feature North America's largest continuous particleboard press. The facility will be over 820,000 sf and have a production capability of 452,000,000 sf of product. The plant size is roughly 150 acres. The contractor on this project had a scope of work that included structural concrete, civil & site work as well as precast erection.
There are many interesting features on this project including the expansive site, deep foundations and tunnel construction. For these features, all concrete, embeds, and rebar were detailed and coordinated in Tekla Structures. Additionally, the excavations and backfill were modeled in Tekla for the main buildings. On areas that were too complex for the formwork supplier to provide drawings, the contractor modeled the formwork in Tekla as well. According to the contractor, “No other single software would have provided the flexibility to easily model so many aspects of the project in a single model and provide the accurate quantities that were obtained.”
