Parliament House in Canberra has almost 3,000 offices and various kitchens and cafeterias that are currently being refurbished. BAVAP Flooring from Sydney, in cooperation with our sales partner HYCHEM, was awarded the contract for a time-critical refurbishment of a 600 sqm canteen kitchen because they were able to offer a particularly fast refurbishment concept. A 40 – 60 mm thick industrial screed was installed on a footfall sound insulation layer in the partly angled rooms.
VELOSIT SC 240 was chosen because one of the requirements was that the floor should be ready for covering with a compressive strength of at least 40 MPa after a maximum of 48 hours. This could be achieved with a mixture of one part VELOSIT SC 240 with four parts of a coordinated grading curve up to approx. 8 mm grain size. The kitchen is located in the middle of the parliament building and it was not possible to use a pressure feed pump, as otherwise the hoses would have disturbed the operation of the parliament.
As a result, 20 pallets of VELOSIT SC 240 and 80 big bags of sand mix were transported at night to an adjoining room in the kitchen using pallet trucks and elevators. There, the screed mixes were produced with 3 Collomix TMX1000 and transported to the installation site with wheelbarrows. The screed was installed in an earth-moist consistency. The main challenge in this project was the coating of the kitchen, as a PU cement was specified. PU cements are usually anchored in the substrate with a milled groove, which was also required for this project. For the HYCRETE PU cement coating used, it was sufficient to create a circumferential groove 5 cm in front of the wall. The coating was applied in sections a few days after the screed was laid.
The owner of BAVAP, Anja Peschler, would of course have preferred to install VELOSIT SC 240 as usual with her Mixokret M760, but carrying out a project of this size with forced action mixers was also an interesting experience. The next kitchen renovations are already in preparation with the same system.
