Suspended Concrete Ground Floor

Suspended slabs are made of concrete and steel mesh the same as a ground slab.

Suspended concrete ground floor. Suspended concrete floors can be supported on timber structures and do not necessarily require steel or masonry support if designed by a qualified engineer with experience in timber design. A slab is ground bearing if it rests directly on the foundation otherwise the slab is suspended. The most common application of suspended slab in residential construction is used at garage floor where below the garage floor is a storage room or additional area for family usage. They are normally pre fabricated offsite and transported by truck.

The floor can be formed in various ways using timber joists precast concrete panels block and beam system or cast in situ with reinforced concrete. This reduces the overall embodied energy and makes for less costly construction. In many domestic and industrial buildings a thick concrete slab supported on foundations or directly on the subsoil is used to construct the ground floor. A suspended floor is a ground floor with a void underneath the structure.

You can either have a concrete base or a suspended floor usually made out of timber. Some slabs have hollow channels running through them these hollow core slabs are used to help reduce weight and also to allow cabling and piping to be run through the slab. Solid floors are a lot more substantial and require the ground to be made up in layers of ground sub base sand compacted hard core damp proof membrane insulation and concrete. Suspended concrete flooring systems were originally developed as a means of overcoming ground problems such as unstable sloping sites where it made sense to bridge deep gaps rather than fill them.

This type of concrete slab construction requires different concrete slab design from the one we normally see that is cast on the ground. Suspended concrete slab is referred to a cement slab that is not in contact with the ground. These slabs are generally classified as ground bearing or suspended. However the floor structure is supported by external and internal walls.

There are various pros and cons to these types of floor some of which impact on the energy efficiency of the building and how you go about insulating them. There are two basic ways to make the floors of a building. A simple reinforced concrete flat slab is not usually economical as a suspended floor spanning over 5 m.