The Evolution of Warehouse Design and Technology
Essential to the functions of trade, warehouses have been discovered in archaeological digs dating back to ancient Rome.
Warehouse buildings were a feature of the urban landscape from the Industrial Revolution through to the latter part of the 20th century. However, the growing scarcity and rising value of urban property gradually caused the redevelopment of many architecturally significant urban warehouse buildings into high-priced residential and mixed-use properties. This in turn pushed the development of more massive and utilitarian-style new warehouse structures into lower-cost regional centres and city-fringe industrial estates.
With the dwindling supply of large tracts of development land near transport hubs, the most innovative nations of industrialised Europe were first to recognise and explore the advantages of expanding warehouse designs vertically, rather than horizontally.
Advances in materials-handling technology allowed for the automation of de-palletising, stacking, picking, and packing in verticalised facilities. Verticalised automation delivered savings on land needs and human resources, along with improved productivity – the automated systems being able to work with much greater speed, safety, and accuracy than manual systems.
Growth of high bay warehousing facilities in Australia
Australian distributors are trending towards high bay warehousing with sophisticated automated systems and we, as engineers, are essentially contributing to the direction of this trend as experts in Australian high bay warehouse engineering design.
CRC has been responsible for the civil and structural engineering of numerous Australian high bay warehouse facilities in the range of 30-40m high, with automated systems for storage and retrieval, such as the new Metcash automated facility in NSW, and for DHL, Baida, and Toll.
Superior approach to high bay warehouse engineering design
The key to successful warehousing automation is the precision surface of the warehouse flooring. Yet, to get the flooring right, the engineer must understand and interpret the requirements of the automated system above, and realise the correct solution for flooring construction methodology and foundations below.
Flooring problems can cause automation to stop working
Application of the FEM design code for storage and retrieval systems is generally not well understood in Australia. The space for automated equipment to manoeuvre is extremely tight, and if the floor happens to become compromised in any way, the automation either can’t perform optimally or will stop working altogether. Flooring must be jointless to maintain the integrity of movement where automated systems are typically mounted on rails. Tilts often cannot exceed 1:2000, and load from uprights can range up to 20-30 tonne.
Wind is a consideration when high bay warehouses are anything up to 40m in height, but wind is commonly dealt with in structural engineering and is a relatively simple problem. Specialist knowledge and experience is needed to work with the high loads and very tight deformation restrictions on the floor as dictated by automation requirements. For optimum performance of systems, everything must be right in the combination of ground conditions, flooring, and automation. Ultimately, it’s about getting the maximum number of pallets and amount of storage into the facility, and the greatest possible number of items processed effectively, therefore maximising return on the investment in capacity and productivity.
