Precast Wall Panels Part of Blast Resistant Facilities: Part 2

Precast Wall Panels Meet Blast Wall Requirements

When Grain Processing Corporation in Muscatine, Iowa needed to replace its distillery control room from the 1960s, one of the requirements was that the room needed to meet blast wall requirements.

Grain Processing Corporation manufactures, distributes, and markets multiple products, mainly derived from corn.

According to Ken Gilkerson, Project Engineer with Grain Processing Corporation, the only two options for meeting the blast wall requirements were precast concrete or CMU.

”When you are doing a control room and you don’t have a lot of penetrations through the walls, it’s a no-brainer to do precast walls,” Gilkerson said. “You get them on a truck, they set them in a week, and they are done.”

Mid-States Concrete provided 23 Wall Panels for the control room project, or roughly 5,800 square feet.

The control room is where the people running the distillery process sit and control it. It’s a two-story building with motor control electricity on the second floor.

”The main thing is, with the blast ratings we have now, the operators can be close to the process in a safe way,” Gilkerson said. “In the past, they had to be farther away because there was no blast rating. It is also larger, so all the operators are in one room so they communicate easier.”

When considering CMU versus precast, Gilkerson found significant savings as he estimates CMU would have taken a team of five roughly two months to complete, with a crane on site every day. Using precast concrete helped Gilkerson take the walls out of the critical path of the schedule.

”You don’t have to deal with mortar mixers and masons all over your project for a month when you can be done in a week,” he said. “We always start with precast panels first when we are designing a project and if we can’t make precast work, in terms of schedule, then we go to CMU.”

Precast Wall Panels Part of Blast Resistant Facilities: Part 1

Precast Wall Panels Selected for $50M Project

In 2016, Mid-States Concrete joined the team undertaking a $50 million expansion project at LyondellBasell in Clinton, Iowa.

The expansion would include administrative offices, a control room, laboratory, and maintenance shop. The LyondellBassell plant manufactures ethylene, the world’s most widely used petrochemical. It also converts ethylene into polythylene plastic resins which serve as building blocks for various products such as leak proof and shatter proof containers for industrial and household chemicals, packaging that protects foods, and children’s toys that are safe and durable.

Mid-States manufactured and installed 165 Wall Panels (totaling more than 44,000 square feet) for the project, which was completed in 2018.

Bush Construction served as the General Contractor on the project. Director of Construction Ryan Welborn said the team considered both tilt-up and precast wall panels for this project, ultimately choosing precast and welcoming Mid-States to the project.

”The precast wall panels were selected as primarily a speed decision and a quality control decision - just a logistics deal,” Welborn said. “We had two options. We could either do tilt-up or precast and from all the things I just mentioned, precast seemed like a significantly better option.”

One of the things that made this project unique is that it’s a facility that works with explosive materials.

”The idea was that they were creating a building that could withstand a blast if something ignited outside,” Welborn said. “It could essentially protect everybody inside the building. It was a way for them to provide further protection for the team.”

Welborn said this is a project that everyone involved should be proud of, as it really was unique. Benefits he found working with precast wall panels include the fast installation process, which takes up much less space on a jobsite than alternatives, like tilt-up. It was also cost-effective, as his team always looks for the most cost-effective package to present to the owner.

In the future, Welborn said he would continue to utilize precast concrete, so long as it is the most cost-effective option. The quicker onsite process, quality control and safety aspects make it an attractive option.

While there is no denying the project came with its challenges, as most don’t have a ton of experience working with blast resistance requirements, Welborn was pleased with the Mid-States team’s ability to keep on top of the design aspect of wall panels.