Safe parking with the Cofraplus® 220 flooring system for the THEO shopping centre car park

Detailed information

The THEO shopping centre, named after Husum's famous poet Theodor Storm, extends over two storeys on the approximately 15 000 m² site of the former Hertie department store in the North Frisian district town.

Architecturally, the new building with its three volumes blends into the urban landscape - an important prerequisite for the design. The vertical orientation is highlighted by the front facade on the Großstraße, which is discreetly emphasised by the large shop windows and the sand-coloured clinker brick facade. The two-storey entrance area is marked by three bronze-framed, slightly protruding windows on the upper floor.

Multi-storey car park in steel composite construction with Cofraplus® 220

At the rear of the site, the parking levels on the first and second floors are located above the ground floor supermarket.  With 650 parking spaces, the THEO car park provides an important parking facility for Husum's city centre.

While the majority of the building was erected as a reinforced concrete skeleton construction and the parking levels’ supporting structure consists of prefabricated reinforced concrete columns in a grid of 10.8 x 8.5 metres, steel plays an important role in the car park. The beams are made of steel and the flooring system was realised in steel-concrete composite construction with the Cofraplus® 220 flooring system from ArcelorMittal. With its patented, deep-rolled steel profile in combination with in-situ concrete, this additive floor system offers an economical alternative to prefabricated concrete floors. Thanks to their low dead weight, the Cofraplus® 220 profiles can be laid easily and quickly by hand, saving crane usage. The stacked profiles also take up little space on the construction site.

Cofraplus® 220 allows for large spans (up to 5.5 metres without propping and up to 9 metres with propping), which in turn creates column-free spaces and flexibility. Thanks to the simple integration of rebar in the rib, fire resistance of REI30 to REI90 can be achieved.

In the THEO car park, so-called WINGS were welded to the steel beams to support the steel profiles. Some of the floor beams were traditionally fitted with shear connector pins, while others were cut in half with a special cutting geometry. These puzzle-shaped cuts of the beam web, known as PreCoBeam from bridge construction, enable a solid bonding effect with the concrete and contribute to better vibration behaviour with the large beam spans.

ArcelorMittal Construction Germany supplied a total of 8 000 m² of pre-coated Cofraplus® 220 profiles to Spannverbund GmbH, the company responsible for the planning and execution. Due to the extensive parking levels, the steel structure had to meet a fire resistance class of R30 and, therefore, had to be coated with fire protection paint. Additionally, the saline coastal environment required a very high corrosion resistance for the coating system as a further, particularly important criterion.

As a result, the robust HENSOTHERM® 910 KS fire protection system from Rudolf Hensel GmbH, a solvent-free, two-component epoxy fire protection coating for corrosion protection class C5 M with a topcoat in the client's desired colour, was selected.

The new parking levels not only serve the shopping centre, but also provide parking in an ideal location for visitors to Husum's city centre, where, as in any city centre, parking is scarce.