Energy
Efficient Educational Centres in Limpopo Province
The
education department of the Limpopo Provincial government
have commissioned a project to build an initial 5
education centres in remote locations in the Limpopo.
Each centre is double storey and comprises about 1800m2
of floor space around a central courtyard. The buildings
will house administration offices, laboratories, training
rooms, computer facilities and libraries
Due
to the extremely high temperatures experienced in
the region a key requirement was to build with thermally
insulating building systems.
To
meet this requirement ABP Building Products are supplying
ABPPolyBlocks for the walls and TASS for the upper
floor slabs.
Another
key requirement was to use local labour.
PolyBlocks
are simple to build with and unlike the 6-9 months
required to become a competent brick layer operators
can be trained to build with the Polyblock system
in a couple of days.
Polyblock
uses a hollow, moulded expanded polystyrene building
block which fits together like a ‘lego’
set and is filled with reinforced concrete.
The
polystyrene is plastered with an expanded polystyrene
plaster system, Polyplast which is a combination of
acrylic resins with plaster sand.
Polyplast
has excellent adhesion to expanded polystyrene, is
easy to apply and does not crack over time.
The
TASS system is being used for the floor slabs. TASS
is essentially a “rib and block” floor
slab system with the advantages that the components
– cold rolled lipped steel ribs and expanded
polystyrene void formers, are lightweight so do not
need heavy lifting equipment to install, are dimensionally
very accurate and once in place act as thermal and
sound insulators.
Both
Polyblock and TASS have the advantage of reducing
site logistics in these remote locations as they are
easy to move around the sites being lightweight.
The
project is being fast tracked to finish in the third
quarter of 2007 and both Polyblock and TASS have the
advantage of being ‘quick to build’ systems.
Limpopo
educational centres showing steel outer frame, ‘cliscoe’
door and window frames made to fit the Polyblock widths
and Polyblock construction to mid wall height.
