Greenhouse Construction, Swiss Project

This is a large single-volume agricultural store and distribution shed on a black lattice-truss steel frame, with an office block and a loading canopy on the road side. The photographs show it in service: pallets of bagged product and rows of bulk bags stacked to the walls, a container being loaded under the canopy. The project register lists it under agricultural / greenhouse; the location is not recorded in the register, so it is not stated here.

Technopol supplied the envelope: LiteSpan wall panels and LiteSpan roof / ceiling panels. LiteSpan is a factory-laminated sandwich — two coated-steel (Chromadek) skins bonded with PU adhesive over an FRCel fire-retarded EPS core, interlocking on a double tongue and groove. The wall board is made with a 50–120 mm core, 480 or 1140 mm cover width and lengths up to 6 000 mm, with steel skins from 0.5 mm. The panel thickness used on this building is not recorded in the sources, so it is not quoted.

What the panel had to do here is the whole job at once. There is no blockwork skin, no lining, no ceiling grid and no separate insulation layer in this building. The panel is fixed to the sheeting rails and the trusses, and at that moment the wall is weatherproof, insulated and finished — inside and out — in one trade. On a store this size that is the argument: a second internal lining trade would have had to work off the same height, on the same programme.

The interior photographs are the proof. Look up and the white surface between the trusses is the underside of the board itself; look across and the same board is the wall the forklift works against. The joints line through. At the doors the panel is cut and closed against the portal column, and the offcuts leaning against the wall show the sandwich on edge. Externally the elevation carries nothing but its own joint lines and the factory coating — no site paint system, no render.

Two things a specifier should carry away with the product. LiteSpan's reaction-to-fire class (B-s1,d0 to SANS 53501-1) is a material classification for the panel used as insulation — it is not a fire-resistance rating, and a fire division needs a separate fire-resistance test. And panel capacity is taken from the LiteSpan load/span design tables, calibrated to the SANS 54509 ITT — not from a photograph.