Technology center is nearly completely precast

The new Technology Center for the automobile supplier and development service provider EDAG Engineering GmbH in Wolfsburg, Germany, is complete and was officially opened on Friday, 2 September. This major project was begun only in March 2015 and has now been completed with the opening of the second building. Remarkable: the high-quality newbuild with an investment volume of around 70 million euros was completely erected with precast elements.

The Development Center offers a gross floor area (GFA) of 6,500 m^² for administration and production: for example, of models and prototypes for the automobile industry. The Technology Center, which accommodates the social and administration sections, comprises 22,000 m^² GFA and was occupied by EDAG employees already in December of 2015. Work in the spacious laboratory and office building focusses on the departments of Design Concept, Vehicle Development and Function, Body Production – as well as project, process, and quality management. The Technology Center is meant to concentrate important production facilities on one site and promote the growth of the group.

Cost optimization

with precast parts

Investor and developer of the new EDAG industrial site is Bertram Projektmanagement GmbH. The company Ed. Züblin AG, as general contractor, was responsible for implementation, and Max Bögl Fertigteilwerke GmbH & Co. KG, as specialist for modular building, was commissioned to erect the carcass. Elbe Delcon GmbH delivered 23,000 m^² of prestressed concrete floor units for the huge usable floor space of the two three- to four-story buildings. The cost of the customized floor elements from Elbe amounted to a total of 720,000 euros.

“This project shows that 95 % of such a complex structure – as here, consisting of laboratory, production, and office facilities – can be realized with precast parts and without difficulty. We erected precast prestressed hollowcore concrete floors, precast reinforced-concrete columns and beams, various types of solid precast reinforced-concrete walls, as well as staircases and landings,” says Karsten Rohmann, General Manager of the Max Bögl precast plant in Liebenau, Germany. “With our special proposal to use precast prestressed hollowcore slabs instead of in-situ floors or floor plates for floor systems, moreover, we were able to further optimize the construction costs.” Andreas Schimmelpfennig, Technical Director at Ed. Züblin AG in Lower Saxony, emphasizes: “In exacting laboratory and industrial construction we especially had very positive experience with precast parts. They are in no way inferior to conventional construction, the costs can be noticeably reduced, and workflows can be considerably accelerated.” The company Elbe was placed in charge of dimensioning, production, and delivery of around 2,500 individual components in addition to office and industrial floors for the architectural and building-component concept of the EDAG Center.

Expensive fire-resistant cladding ­unnecessary

Prestressed concrete floor slabs of type EFD 22 and 120 were used, as well as type EID 40 and 120. The floor slabs from Elbe with spans of between 7.2 and 13.1 m are in conformity with official approval standards and can bear great loads despite their own low intrinsic weight. The client, however, had feared that the floor structure would have to be extensively stabilized with fire-resistant cladding at the steel replacements to ensure fire safety. Thomas Münzberg, structural engineer and plant manager at the company Elbe Decken, however, was able to demonstrate in a design proposal that the Elbe floor system “works” highly effectively: the always inherent shear resistance of the joints between the floor slabs secures the plane loadbearing structure,“ explains Münzberg. ”For that reason, no additional measures whatsoever for fire protection were needed.” This application technology in the structural design saved around 25,000 euros for fire-resistant claddings, excluding installation costs.

Bertram Projektmanagement, which specializes in logistics, office, retail and industrial building, handed over the building to the user in July of 2016. “We are very satisfied with the planning and implementation of the project, especially about the fact that the first employees of EDAG were able to start working already in December of 2015,” said Peter Bertram, Managing Director of Bertram Projektmanagement. “Modular building not only ensured fast completion of the project – both centers were erected in only nine to twelve months – but also enabled great flexibility and sustainability of use. Repurposing of rooms, for example, is possible without great time and expense. The same applies to long-term perspectives: e.g., for a possible third-party use.”