New precast plant in Heiden inaugurated

The Brüninghoff Group precast plant at its Heiden location is oriented to sustainable production. To achieve this objective, the specialist in hybrid construction uses an environmentally friendly cement type and replaces part of the cement clinker with granulated blast-furnace slag. This leads to reduced carbon-dioxide emission during production. Additional sustainability is achieved through the use of recycled concrete. To enable R concrete to satisfy the special requirements of prefabrication, Brüninghoff has optimized its formula to ensure the necessary early strength. For R concrete, part of the gravel is mixed with recycled aggregate (crushed concrete). This low-emission production process and resources-saving material utilization find a suitable environment in the newly erected plant in Heiden.

Capacities and technical facilities

The precast plant is situated on an area of 30,000 m², of which the building takes up more than half. A three-aisle hall offers a production area of approx. 10,000 m² – one aisle each for column, wall and pallet production. The hall opens up into a large roofed-over outdoor storage area of 4,500 m². Whereas up to 8,000 m³ of concrete were processed in the previous location, the new production plant offers a processing volume of at least 25,000 m³.

The hall is equipped with modern technical facilities for efficient production of the various construction elements. The linear elements are produced in seven forms up to 34 m in length, partly fitted with a foundation form for production of columns with unformed foundation. Battery forms with maximum element dimensions of 9.0 x 3.7 m offer capacities for production of six to ten solid-concrete walls. A carousel system with up to 35 shuttered pallets for elements measuring 9.4 x 3.7 x 0.45 m, and a maximum weight of 17 tons for series production of hybrid composite elements provides for an annual capacity of clearly above 150.000 m².

Sustainable construction method

But Brüninghoff’s new concrete plant not only uses recycled concrete with optimized formula, and with efficient and climate-friendly processing: recycled concrete was also used for the construction of the plant. This is because the building is holistically oriented toward sustainability. The design comes from Plansite, the design spin-off of the Brüninghoff Group. In addition to the goal to design an environmentally friendly building, the focus was on sustainability already during the planning and construction phase.

The Plansite team based its design on climate-friendly construction methods and efficient resource utilization – and on thorough understanding of materials and solid experience in the combination of materials and Building Information Modeling.

Ecological use of resources

In addition to the sustainable outer shell, an essential characteristic of the precast plant is its use of ecological resources – for generating heat and energy as well as for the production process itself. An example of this is the solar panel system installed on the roof of the building for energy generation. Currently, a total of 680 solar panels with a peak output of 200 kW are installed on an area of 1,238 m². In the future, the system will be further extended to generate a peak of approx. 1,450 kW. The annual electricity generated will then range at around 1,240,000 kWh. The panels not only supply the production process but also the in-house-operated charging station for electrical vehicles. The vehicles will in future be used for transporting concrete. The plant, too, is heated with green energy. The heat is regeneratively and efficiently provided via a heat pump. Furthermore, energy-saving industrial floor heating units will be used. In order to additionally make the production process and water consumption of the technical facilities even more sustainable in other places, a service water cistern was erected on the company grounds. With a holding capacity of 1,000 m³, the rainwater collected here is used to supply the adjacent concrete mixer plant, thus reducing groundwater extraction.

The fact that the building satisfies high sustainability standards in ecological, social-cultural, functional, technical and economic terms has already been confirmed in a pre-certificate in gold by the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB) –certification for the entire building in operationist a further goal.