Concrete floors are an essential part of your plant infrastructure. Let’s face it, there’s no other real affordable option for large product storage areas. But, these large floor have to have joints to allow for stress relief and expansion/contraction to prevent cracking that could lead to eventual structural failure.

These joints have always been a weak point in the flooring system for areas of heavy traffic. However, the introduction of automated lifts and carts have pushed conventional joint design past its limits. These machines are precise. So precise that the wheels never vary from the most efficient and direct path. This shows up in wear patterns in the floor. However, the real damage is to the joint. These heavy loads are concentrated on smaller wheels that make the machine

You’ve noticed that the joints in your higher traffic areas look like they’re getting wider. The edges of the concrete seem to be “chipping away.”

Now is the time to prevent any further damage to these joints. Afterall, you need the concrete floors in your plant to be in shape to support your operations for a long time and you can’t afford to replace them. Unfortunately, this is a common problem. Most concrete floors are left with joints that are open because the conventional wisdom is that these joints are small and not really affected by large rubber forklift tires. There’s also the fact that the cost of filling all of the joints is just not worth it. There’s just too many feet to fill.

Now that you’re in operation, you have established traffic patterns and that means some joints will get the brunt of the traffic

Maintaining the overall health and integrity of your plant’s floor may not seem like a huge part of overall operations, but it is. Everything starts on the ground floor – from foot traffic, to forklift traffic. Small cracks lead to big cracks and big cracks could lead to having to replace an entire area of the floor which could cost production time and decreased efficiency.

It would be nice if your floor was one single huge concrete pad. The reality is that a floor is made up of 100s of slabs separated by joints. The purpose of these joints – to prevent random cracking in the concrete as it shrinks. Since raw materials and finished goods need to be transported, naturally, each individual joint is a transition point that forklifts and employees must cross.

Once the corner of a joint is damaged, spalling can