Raised Access Flooring

An access floor is a floor placed upon a floor, thus creating an accessible plenum for the distribution of building services such as power, voice and data and the distribution of heating and cooling services. Raised floor installation for critical facilities is becoming more popular for several reasons. The telecommunication central offices, the emergency control centers, operation control centers, banks, and insurance companies take advantage of raised floor when upgrading the facility with the most current electronic equipment. In addition to providing an aesthetically pleasing environment, it makes cables routing during refurbishment and expansion faster and less costly. Clusters of cables, both power and signal cables, can be organized for easy tracing during troubleshooting. It can also act as an air plenum for cool air. Numerous problems with cables in cable trays are eliminated.

The basic ideas to mitigate earthquake damage of equipment installed on the raised floor.

Planning is the most important phase of a raised floor installation, particularly in a seismic environment. The key factors that affect the design are raised floor height, seismic zone, equipment weight and height, and height within the building it is installed.

A typical raised floor system consists of four elements that are always part of the commercially available hardware and two components that are almost also needed for a seismically capable installation.

A pedestal with the base plate,

A pedestal head that fits on top of the pedestal that supports the stringers, if used, and the floor tiles,

Stringers, if used, that bridge the pedestals supporting the edges of the floor tiles

Floor tiles that form the raised floor,

Custom braces that give selected pedestals added lateral resistance

Custom structural platform that anchor heavy equipment directly to the building floor.