Alexander Anderson required the construction of a large building on a site adjacent to the client’s existing site in Bo’ness. The brownfield site had concrete-framed buildings and concrete hard standings.
BHC designed the building to accommodate automated timber log handling and processing equipment, drying equipment, storage silos, boiler room, switchgear banks complete with below-floor ducts and provision for welfare facilities.
The building is insulated with composite panels to roof and walls, with a cavity facing brick dado wall for the interface with ground level. The building is accommodated with many large insulated slide-over doors. This included a high-speed fabric door to enable loaded pallets to pass out the building via an airlock arrangement.
Parts of the installed equipment were very heavy and this was supported with steel beams on a thick concrete slab and then encapsulated in the floor slab. A 13 metre high bay in the building provided for tipping articulated trailers within the building enclosure for environmental issues.
The site is located on the south side of the River Forth, directly behind the recently-built flood defence wall for this lower area of Bo’ness. Because of the quality of the ground conditions the new building is placed on an engineered concrete ring beam foundation.
The complete site was capped with a fibre-reinforced concrete slab. This incorporated BHC-designed linear drainage, with silt and floatable traps before the surface water enters an attenuation trench. The trench was filled with single-sized stone and had a perforated drainage pipe in the base. This connected to an outflow manhole fitted with a restricted 110 mm diameter outlet complete with a CheckMate in-line non-return valve. This was required because the outflow was connected to a Scottish Water pipe passing through the site to the tidal Forth estuary.
The 2400 mm diameter boiler and drier exhaust flues passed through the composite panels roof. These were sealed to the roof with GRP soakers formed on site.
Structural steelwork was designed and erected internally to form compartments within the building and to support the complex configuration of screw conveyors, bucket conveyors, storage silos and acoustic enclosures. Some of this steelwork was painted to meet the materials handling equipment specialist specification.
