Structural Expansion Joints and Sealants

Everyone knows that it’s tough to get out of prison — but it’s even tougher to get into prisons. Spec’d in and installed that is. But that’s exactly what we’re doing at the newly constructed Federal Prison in Berlin, New Hampshire.

We saw firsthand how heavily engineered and constructed a federal prison is. They’re built with large panel concrete walls and floors. That large amount of concrete makes frequent expansion joints necessary throughout the structure to handle the movement and joining of the walls and floors. And because fires have to be contained (leave-the-building fire drills aren’t encouraged in prisons, naturally) every expansion joing has to be fire-rated.

A typical installation of the many materials needed to seal, bridge and fire-rate joints can be a nightmare. The positioning of these materials is usually inefficient and quite ineffective. There are the traditional fire-blankets which require installation from the underside of floors and require utility lift equipment for access. The wiring, plumbing and mechanical components often prevent access to the mounting surfaces needed for the fire-blanket flanges, and split-columns interrupt the run of the fire-blankets which cause a breach in the life-safety barrier.

The new line of EMSHIELD products was seen as a great match for these conditions. After reviewing the products the prison construction board whole-heartedly approved the choice of both EMSHIELD WFR2 and DFR2 to be used in this project.

DFR2 is UL-certified 2-hour fire rated and it provides a watertight seal. It was installed entirely from above the floor slabs, so it required no special access equipment. Because joints accessed from above are unobstructed by the work of other trades, a straight shot installation was possible and the material was able to be installed continuously through the split columns. It made for an easier installation and most importantly it provided the continuity of the fire barrier.

WFR2 was installed to handle the expansion movement of the interior concrete walls and to provide the 2-hour UL certified wall fire-rating which the prison demanded. Both systems provide a watertight seal when the joints need to be watertight (such as in cleaning or wet exposure or in the extreme case of fire extinguishing). And both EMSHIELD systems also provide a Sound Transmission Class of 62 and an Outdoor Indoor Transmission Class of 52. This means that interior and exterior noise that might otherwise have got through the expansion joints will be blocked as effectively or better than the concrete walls themselves.

The installation went very well with the crew raving about the ease of installing a single-unit expansion joint that did everything in just one installation. In the end EMSHIELD is proving to be the perfect expansion joint choice for the construction of this prison.

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If you’ve got a design or job with a lot of transitions at the expansion joints here is a story that should be of  interest you.

We’re supplying the expansion joints being installed at the parking garage (parkade) at North York General Hospital in Toronto, Canada. It’s a project which involves a lot of transitions throughout the entire structure. We were able to create these in our Westborough factory and ship them as final units ready to install.

The hospital’s new additions include a large parking structure that’s being built to handle the growing patient and staff population. The finished project has to be watertight and also handle the movements of the large concrete structure in the extreme thermal conditions found in Toronto. The expansion gaps were engineered into the designs and we supplied our EMSEAL Thermaflex watertight membrane/nosing systems as the expansion joint throughout the parking decks.

The problem that usually crops up is that the transition points in expansion joints are usually a weakness of even the best engineering designs. When they’re created in the field they slow the installation process. They can also be the cause of a failing waterseal. The best solution is to have factory-fabricated transitions built into the expansion system before it arrives at the jobsite. That’s exactly what we did in this project.

Over 1500 feet of TCR-500, TCR-400 and TCR-300 was specified and installed. Quite a bit of this length required transitions and turns because of columns, multiple decks and intersecting walls, parapets and roofs. To maintain the continuity of seal throughout the system, we factory-fabricated the almost 100 transitions throughout the system. Deck to wall, wall to wall and deck to deck changes in direction and plane were all built into the system at our new EMSEAL factory in Westborough, Mass.

The transitions are different widths of sealant joined together and are especially worth noting. The differing gap widths require TCR-500 to be joined with either TCR-400 or TCR-300. Each turn and tee calls for joining materials of different widths. We were able to manufacture all of these as factory-fabricated transitions so that they don’t have to be welded in the field. And we delivered the final systyem as a series of lengths of membranes with transitions prefabricated and ready to be installed. This lets us to be certain that everything will be watertight and easier to install.

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