Manildra Milling Equipment Enclosure

Summarize the project's program, features, and achievements: Manildra Group USA is a trusted supplier of wheat protein isolates, wheat gluten and starch to food manufacturing companies. They are dedicated to providing their customers the highest quality and safest products at the best total value in the market place. Manildra began manufacturing in Hamburg, IA in 1994, and since then continue to expand and diversify Ingredients to meet customer needs in a changing market. This project was designed to enclose specific equipment related to their business. Achieving success on this project took great planning from start to finish. The site was very congested and existing equipment required extensive layout and crane placement planning as well as stack casting of the panels. These panels were 58 feet tall, so to maneuver them for placement during erection took considerable amount of up-front planning.

What obstacles were overcome related to the schedule, budget, program, specification, site, etc. on this project? Our team faced several challenges to complete this project. The client requested that this project be tall enough to enclose the very large processing equipment that had already been purchased (and partially installed) before the project started. Because we needed to produce very tall tilt-up panels, another challenge was to find an area to cast the panels. Because the client would have the interior of the building full of equipment prior to tilting up panels, we couldn’t utilize the interior floor area for casting (or for bracing to). The area around the proposed building was surrounded by other buildings and an access road (that needed to stay operational), so casting beds were created for many of the panels and stack casting was completed for several of the other panels. Scheduling the days when the panels would be tilted up became a challenge as the wind in the area created such a strong force on the very tall panels. For safety reasons we had to reschedule the tilt-up over several days and ended up working over a weekend to erect the panels so as to avoid the high winds in the area. Because the client had equipment in place prior to erecting the panels, we needed to take great care not to allow the panels to contact the existing equipment that was only a couple feet away from the inside of the panels.

Please communicate any engineering complexities or unique features of the panel design for this project. ? Since the client had equipment already installed on the interior of the building, the engineer needed to design the panels to be braced from the exterior of the building (rather than the interior). The engineer was also charged with the task of designing temporary concrete legs within the tilt-up panel openings so that the structural integrity of the panels would be maintained during the tilt-up operations.

What is the potential for this project's impact on the community and/or environment? Manildra Group USA strives for quality, service, and reliability in everything they do from the products they supply to the people that answer the phone when you call. For companies producing food products using wheat isolates, wheat, and wheat starches, Manildra USA is the trusted single-source supplier that provides high quality products, responsive customer service and leads the industry in product innovation and technological expertise. As Manildra continues to grow, it not only adds capacity to one of the community’s largest employers in Hamburg, Iowa but it has grown into a global organization with major production facilities in Australia, Thailand, and the United States, as well as offices throughout the world. They continue to be on the leading edge of scientific research and creative (or innovative) development of wheat-based products for the food industry.