The Vertex Business Park is a 4.8 acre site located in the Emersons Green Enterprise zone. Being just four miles from junction19 on the M4 motorway, the 11 warehouse/office complex has tree lined boulevards and generous landscaped areas incorporating dedicated car parks, concreted access and hard standing designed to handle HGV traffic. With such a large concreted area an effective surface water drainage system was essential.
Having supplied high capacity surface water drainage channels for hard-standing areas at numerous distribution centres thorough out the UK, Hauraton were confident their RECYFIX® HICAP® high capacity channels would comply with the stringent specification asked for by the contractors.
Three sizes of RECYFIX® HICAP® F–2000, 3000 and 5000, with a loading category Class F900 (900kN ) were used to drain the HGV hard standing and car park areas at the Park. All the sizes supplied had fixed ductile iron, 14mm open slot inlets finished with KTL, a rust resistant coating. By affording a superior overall hydraulic performance, the 216 metres of channel installed, provided a water storage volume totalling 8,904 litres.
The HICAP® system generally allows engineers and contractors’ flexibility in layout by reducing number of channel runs normally required to drain a given area. This can mean less underground excavations, materials and vastly reduced installation time. Usually as there are fewer runs required, the surfaces strength is not compromised while future maintenance and cleaning will also be reduced.
With laden HGVs weighing up to 44 tonnes, manoeuvring trucks impose an enormous twisting stresses on the surface drainage components. So not only must the area be efficiently drained, the installed system has to withstand the twisting forces exerted by truck wheels.
Cat Jones, the Hauraton Project Manager, was certain the company’s high capacity channels chosen for this job would easily match the specification demanded by Kore Construction;
“The RECYFIX® HICAP® F channel components are made from specially formulated tough RECYCLED polypropylene (PP) and as each one metre channel used, including its ductile iron inlet, weighed less than 25kg it allowed one-man-lift, so greatly simplified the handling and logistics for the contractor who found the combination of a tough PP channel and ductile iron slot inlet highly resisted to site damage during installation”.
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