Industry: Pharmaceutical
Dur-A-Flex Contractor: Blair Duron Restoration, LLC.
Scope of Work: Install 100,000 square feet on new concrete. The project was broken up into manageable 5,000 square foot sections.
Substrate: New-construction, freshly poured concrete
Dur-A-Flex System: Hybri-Flex EQ & Poly-Crete MDB Systems
The work that takes place within the walls of pharmaceutical companies is groundbreaking and often life-saving. Everything in these facilities needs to be superior so that production lines keep moving to produce the products people quite literally need to live and so that those products are of the highest quality. North Carolina was chosen for the U.S. location for this international manufacturer, and this facility would produce both branded and generic pharmaceuticals, as well as provide contract development and manufacturing services for other companies’ products. Therefore, not only did the facility need to adhere to the highest quality standards for their own products, but the facility would also need to represent the company as a reputable and reliable contract manufacturer to other companies.
With a 155,000 square foot facility in design and 100,000 square foot of specialty flooring requirements, it was imperative that the correct floors be chosen to serve as the ”foundation” of this world-class facility. Since the facility was new-construction, the floors would be installed over concrete that was recently poured. Installation of most flooring products on new concrete requires a waiting period of over a month. To ensure the project remained on schedule, a solution was needed. The answer? Two Dur-A-Flex systems: Hybri-Flex EQ (epoxy quartz) and Poly-Crete MDB (medium duty broadcast) as they both offer a base coat of Poly-Crete that provides great moisture tolerance. The differentiator with Poly-Crete is that it can be installed as quickly as 5 days after a concrete slab has been poured. For this project, this turnaround time allowed the floor installation crew to get to work nearly immediately – especially important on a job of this size.
For the wet-processing areas where Dur-A-Flex’s Poly-Crete MDB was installed it was chosen for two important reasons: moisture tolerance and its ability to handle thermal shock. Poly-Crete floors are cementitious urethane-based systems and their concrete-like properties allow them to tolerate the quick temperature shifts involved with thermal cycling.
With over 100,000 square feet to install, the project was broken up into manageable 5,000 square foot sections to keep each area clean and well contained from other trades working in the facility while the floors were being installed. On a project this size, teamwork is essential and Dan Conaghan of Blair Duron credits teamwork among Blair Duron as the installer, BE&K Building Group as the General Contractor and Dur-A-Flex as the flooring manufacturer of choice – as the reason this was a truly seamless project (pun intended). “Working as teammates on this project was certainly the key to how successful this project was – over 100,000 square feet of flooring was installed with an almost negligible punch list.”