Precast Wall Panels Meet Blast Wall Requirements

When Grain Processing Corporation in Muscatine, Iowa needed to replace its distillery control room from the 1960s, one of the requirements was that the room needed to meet blast wall requirements.

Grain Processing Corporation manufactures, distributes, and markets multiple products, mainly derived from corn.

According to Ken Gilkerson, Project Engineer with Grain Processing Corporation, the only two options for meeting the blast wall requirements were precast concrete or CMU.

”When you are doing a control room and you don’t have a lot of penetrations through the walls, it’s a no-brainer to do precast walls,” Gilkerson said. “You get them on a truck, they set them in a week, and they are done.”

Mid-States Concrete provided 23 Wall Panels for the control room project, or roughly 5,755 square feet.

The control room is where the people running the distillery process sit and control it. It’s a two-story building with motor control electricity on the second floor.

”The main thing is, with the blast ratings we have now, the operators can be close to the process in a safe way,” Gilkerson said. “In the past, they had to be farther away because there was no blast rating. It is also larger, so all the operators are in one room so they communicate easier.”

When considering CMU versus precast, Gilkerson found significant savings as he estimates CMU would have taken a team of five roughly two months to complete, with a crane on site every day. Using precast concrete helped Gilkerson take the walls out of the critical path of the schedule.

”You don’t have to deal with mortar mixers and masons all over your project for a month when you can be done in a week,” he said. “We always start with precast panels first when we are designing a project and if we can’t make precast work, in terms of schedule, then we go to CMU.”