Decking flooring: Metal decking is typically used for multi-storey buildings, mezzanines and car parks.

The £155million Colmore Plaza project in Birmingham is the tallest building in the UK to specify Dramix® Steel Fibre Concrete for each of its 14 floors.

The Plaza’s city centre location necessitated carefully planned night pours of the innovative flooring solution. Space at the site is so restricted that a traditional mesh-based flooring solution was fraught with problems – but Dramix® pumped onto Kingspan Multideck was the easier and more economical answer.

Dramix® steel fibre reinforced concrete provides a pre-reinforced concrete slab which requires no mesh and simplifies the floor laying process – significantly reducing completion time and improving health and safety onsite. Dramix® fibres are made from prime quality hard-drawn steelwire to guarantee high tensile strength and close tolerances. Added to the concrete mix, the fibres ensure full depth reinforcement and excellent crack control.

For the Colmore building, Kingspan approved installer MSW laid the Multideck, whilst Technic Floors co-ordinated the addition of the steel fibres at a Cemex batching plant. The reinforced concrete was then pumped into each floor of the office building according to a strictly controlled night-time schedule to cause minimum disruption to the surrounding area.

GRIMSBY'S Seafood Village has moved a step closer to completion, after the concrete was poured for the first floor of the two-storey building.

Developer QA Construction says work on the £2.4 million flagship development is progressing well and is hoping to finish the project ahead of schedule.

Pete Dalton, joint managing director of the seafood village, expressed confidence that the facility would be "oversubscribed" by the time construction work was completed.

Already, 15 of the 20 units have been let by seafood companies, with several others expressing a keen interest.

As reported, the state-of-the-art development, which is located on a four-acre site off Wickham Road, near Grimsby Docks, will cater for 20 fish processing firms and provide shared waste collection, cold stores and distribution facilities.

Mr Dalton said: "They are going to be 21st-century units that will comply with or exceed all the European health standards.

"Everything the merchants need will be on one site – the transport people, the ice people. They won't need to go anywhere else.

"The units are good value for money and we have had quite a lot of interest from various people.

The floor comprised of 250mm deep concrete slab comprising of top and bottom mesh fabric laid on a methane barrier. Both membrane and reinforcement were set up in advance to facilitate pre-pour inspection by Building Control Inspector.

Concrete was placed by means of mobile pumping equipment utilising a 32metre boom. The whole area was cast in two days.

The Somero Copperhead laser was the chosen method of construction. The Copperhead enabled laser technology to be utilised whilst working upon two layers of mesh. The laser screed striked off the concrete to finished floor level whilst automatically vibrating and smoothing the concrete surface.

The project required in excess of 10000m2 of concrete floors to slab depth ranging from 300mm to 1.6meters all heavily congested with rebar. Daily concrete requirements ranged from 80 cubic meters to in excess of 500 cubic meters all to be within a surface regularity of FM2 in accordance with Concrete Society Advisory document TR34 2003 edition Various joint detailing methods were utilised to both protect and support the joint arris whilst maintain load transfer.

Typical loading requirements varied from 100Kn racking leg loads to a static point load of the storage footing of 250KN