Hemant Chauhan, Senior Manager, Buildcon Consultants Pvt Ltd talks about the specialty products offered by his company which caters to flooring, waterproofing and insulation of buildings.

What are the market opportunities for your products in India? What are the essential growth drivers?
One of our key offering is Concrete Floor Casting Service meant for Warehouses & Large Industries.

Warehousing is still at an early stage in India. The concept of proper warehouse planning and design has been only now introduced seriously because of requirements by big box retailers& brands like Amazon, Flipkart, IKEA etc.

The GST regime has brought in a huge opportunity to have storage at strategic location on a Pan-India basis. Lots of players have jumped into the fray for making warehousing facilities.

The importance of correct specification for Industrial Flooring is finally getting the attention that it deserves. A lot of warehouses and industries face problems because the concrete flooring was not designed and executed as per requirements of the operations. This happened because a normal civil contractor making the warehouse would bring in a typical “VDF Contractor” who would use outdated and in-fact a harmful system of making the large concrete floor using “Dewatering Method”. In the presence of Ready Mixed Concrete a Dewatering or a VDF system is wrong concept. These days we have easily available controlled concrete that avoids need of any Dewatering process and this in-turn allows lot of options to improve the quality of the cast floor.

Can you elucidate on your product range and applications?
We are a specialty contracting company since 1990 and have three verticals focused on

• Flooring
• Waterproofing
• Insulation of Buildings

Our flooring experience starts from being one of the first to introduce original Tremix Flooring system to our market in 1990. Since then we have upgraded to latest fully automatic robotic boom screeding laser guided system for large flooring projects. Our team has experience to execute flooring projects in remote locations and help our clients get quality flooring for their facilities even in far off locations. The concept of casting a concrete floor has now great awareness due to increasing demands of operations. Fortunately we also have experience from our other divisions dealing in Construction Chemicals and we are able to combine material, experience and art with science to deliver floors that perform as expected.

Our Waterproofing Division has undertaken projects ranging from Delhi Metro Underground Station to large oil refineries & other green field projects.

In fact with our infrastructure we can execute project anywhere in the world. We have been able to execute some of category first projects using cutting edge systems of the industry. The company is fortunate to have grown Pan-India with a team of dedicated engineers and applicators.

How can admixtures play an effective role in building seismic proof structures?
To put it simply, Admixture or Superplasticizers are as basic requirement to concrete as cement itself.

As designs of structures are getting more complicated and more demanding on the basic concrete itself, we need high performance concrete, self compacting properties, we need better & higher grades of concrete and all this with reducing human interference to maintain quality control.

The importance of Superplasticizer can be judged from the fact that IS Code 456 makes it mandatory to use Admixtures for concrete.

Taller structures are able to have better seismic designs with thinner members as they are cast with higher quality of concrete & thus contribute to over all safety of the building structures because of more optimized load distribution.

How do you ensure that your epoxy flooring solutions are resistant to heat and chemicals?
The epoxy flooring or synthetic flooring is a category that now has upgraded technologies like polyurethane based flooring screeds.

The normal epoxy flooring has come a long way with having better properties of scratch resistance as compared to past.

We have hybrid epoxy systems for high performance chemical resistance and also added abrasion resistance of polyurethanes to withstand rapid movement for heavy traffic floors.

Epoxy SLF or Self Level Flooring systems are now easy to apply and come in per-measured kits that can be just spread as per thickness required to get easy to clean floors. These can be pressure washed with hot water up- to 80C to clean up the floor.

Food Industries, Medicine Plants, Textile Units and such facilities need regular cleaning for maintaining standards as per various International Quality certifications.

How does epoxy help in creation of sustainable surfaces in living and commercial spaces?
Epoxy or Synthetic flooring can easily replace natural stone & tile application on the flooring space even for commercial & large spaces such as schools and auditoriums.

In-fact concepts like Epoxy Terrazzo uses recycled or left over aggregates from the stone processing industry to make very long lasting floors that provide look of natural stones or as per requirement of design.

Such Epoxy Terrazzo floor last up-to the life time of building and seldom need repairs with regular maintenance. One of the major project using Epoxy Terrazzo flooring system is at the Delhi International Airport where it has been approved due to its long lasting properties.

Also some of the cutting edge epoxy polyurethane systems are water based, that avoids use of harmful solvents and are safe of environment as well as for the applicators.

A new use of Epoxy Polyurethane flooring system is for making Parking Decks.These days there are large parking spaces that have regular load change as vehicles come and go. When a parking deck is fully loaded it bends a bit and straightens out again when load is removed, this creates unique requirement to protect the concrete slab. Flexible Epoxy PU hybrid system for parking deck is now available that helps to protect slabs and increase the service life of the facility.

Hemant Chauhan, Senior Manager, Buildcon Consultants Pvt Ltd