Area of Expertise: High-Bay Warehouse Foundations
In the industrial sector, Skald is known for its specialization in high-bay warehouse foundations both standard and deep-freeze. These foundations demand a high level of technical precision and attention to detail in practice. They are an area where we have built up extensive expertise through numerous projects across Vlaanderen and beyond.
High-Bay Warehouse Foundations
High-bay warehouses store everything from ambient goods and potatoes to pharmaceuticals and deep-frozen food, stacked twenty or thirty meters high in automated racking systems that run with almost no human intervention. When the racking goes in and the cranes start running, the foundation underneath it has to be right. Those cranes operate to very tight tolerances and the racking is sensitive to movement in a way that most structures simply are not. A settlement that would never be noticed in an office building or a factory is enough to take a crane aisle out of service. Getting the foundation right is not a structural formality; it is what the whole operation depends on.
Standard High-Bay
Our high-bay foundations are pile-supported slabs designed to Eurocode, with the deflection limits set by FEM 9.831, the racking industry's own serviceability standard. Wind is a bigger factor than it might seem on a building of this height: the overturning forces reach all the way down to the piles as both downward pressure and upward pull, and we design for both. Slab thickness and pile layout come from the deflection requirements, which in practice means thicker zones at the building edges and bracing points where the structure is working hardest. Piles go under columns wherever the layout allows, which simplifies the load path and keeps the build straightforward.
Deep-Freeze High-Bay
A frozen-store warehouse adds a layer of complexity that changes the foundation design significantly. The floor cannot sit directly on the ground because the cold from the building would eventually freeze the soil beneath it, and frozen ground that thaws and refreezes moves. So the slab sits above an insulation layer instead, with heating elements below it keeping the ground above zero permanently. That insulation layer is structurally inert: it cannot carry the loads from the racking columns down to the piles, and it cannot hold tension. Both of those constraints have to be designed around, and they affect everything from how the columns are supported to how wind forces travel through the structure.
Steel and Concrete
How much reinforcement goes into the slab, and where, is worth working out carefully. These slabs cannot have movement joints. Crack width has to be controlled through reinforcement alone across the full surface. We have developed our own method for calculating the minimum reinforcement that achieves this, drawing on several standards and refined across many completed projects. It gives lower quantities than a conservative reading of any single standard would, and the buildings we have delivered on that basis confirm it works. Beyond crack control, the loads across the slab are far from uniform: the building edges and bracing points carry large tension forces from wind, the areas around piles and columns have their own shear demands, and the anchor positions where the racking columns bolt into the concrete have requirements of their own. We work through each zone on its own terms. Where steel-fibre-reinforced concrete solves a problem more cleanly than adding conventional reinforcement, we use it. Where it does not earn its place, we do not.
Modelling
The foundation is modelled as a full three-dimensional structure, with the complete loading from the racking system fed in directly. That gives a genuine picture of how the slab behaves as a whole: where loads concentrate, how settlement distributes, where the design is being pushed. We have developed our own methods for getting large racking load datasets into the model efficiently, so the process is fast without cutting corners on what the model actually represents.
