Quartz-hardened industrial concrete floor

A continuous, joint-free floor made of a concrete slab cast on the ground (or on a structural floor) and surface-hardened with a quartz dry-shake. Designed to withstand heavy forklift traffic, abrasion and the concentrated loads of racking, it combines structure and finish in a single pour. Mesh or fibres control shrinkage cracking, while properly cut joints govern the movements of the large surface.

An industrial floor is a large-area concrete slab that serves at once as the supporting structure and the working surface. It is cast on a prepared base — sub-base, insulation, vapour barrier and, usually, a reinforced ground slab or screed — and finished on top while the concrete is still fresh. The result is a continuous, flat and durable plane, able to carry trolleys, forklifts and automated warehouses for years.

Onto the fresh concrete, during floating, a quartz (or corundum) and cement dry-shake is spread: worked in with power trowels, it forms a very hard, dense and low-porosity surface layer, intimately bonded to the slab. It is this hardened «skin» that resists wheel abrasion, impact and dusting, where bare concrete would crumble. Careful curing keeps the surface from losing water too fast and cracking.

Concrete shrinks as it dries and cracks if its movement is restrained. To control it the slab is reinforced with welded mesh or fibres (steel or polymer) that stitch the micro-cracks, and control joints are cut within a few hours of the pour: by scoring the surface you «pre-set» where the slab will crack, in straight, hidden lines instead of at random. Joints divide the large surface into regular bays and absorb their movements.

Performance depends as much on the slab as on what lies beneath: a well-compacted, uniform base prevents differential settlement and edge «curling». Flatness is checked to strict tolerances where there is high racking or automated guided vehicles. Where chemical resistance or maximum cleanability is needed — food, pharmaceutical — a resin coating is applied instead of, or over, the dry-shake.