Project Overview

This pre-engineered cold storage warehouse is located in the Dammam Second Industrial City in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. The client is a regional pharmaceutical distributor serving hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies across the Eastern Province and neighboring regions. The facility is required to maintain a storage temperature of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius throughout the storage volume, complying with the cold chain storage requirements of the Saudi Food and Drug Authority for pharmaceutical products.

The project presented three primary engineering challenges: achieving the thermal performance required for continuous pharmaceutical cold storage in Saudi Arabia's extreme climate, managing the elevated humidity of the Dammam coastal environment that creates condensation risk in cold storage structures, and completing construction within the client's 90-day target to meet regulatory licensing timelines.

Meituo Buildings supplied the complete insulated steel structure system, including the primary portal frame, 150-millimeter PU sandwich panel roof and wall cladding, insulated floor system, cold room doors, and full engineering documentation including thermal calculations, structural calculations, and vapor barrier design.

Project Specifications

The warehouse has a total floor area of 2,400 square meters, with a building width of 40 meters and length of 60 meters. The eave height is 8 meters. The entire building volume is maintained as a single controlled-temperature zone at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius, with a separate ambient-temperature loading vestibule of 300 square meters at the building entrance to prevent warm air ingress during goods receipt and dispatch operations.

The primary structural frame uses Q355B welded H-section steel columns and rafters, designed for the structural loads including the additional dead load of 150-millimeter PU sandwich panels, which are heavier than standard industrial panel systems. All structural members were hot-dip galvanized, chosen for maximum corrosion resistance in the coastal Dammam environment and also to eliminate any risk of coating damage during panel installation that would create corrosion initiation points in the difficult-to-access interior once cladding was in place.

Thermal Envelope Design

The thermal envelope design is the defining engineering feature of this project. Maintaining 2 to 8 degrees Celsius inside a building in Dammam, where summer outdoor temperatures exceed 45 degrees Celsius, requires exceptionally high thermal resistance throughout the building envelope with no gaps, bridges, or defects.

Roof cladding: 150-millimeter polyurethane sandwich panels with 0.5-millimeter PPGI exterior face in white PVDF coating and 0.4-millimeter PPGI interior face in white polyester coating. Panel thermal conductivity (lambda value) is 0.023 watts per meter Kelvin, giving the 150-millimeter panel an R-value of approximately 6.5 square meter Kelvin per watt.

Wall cladding: 150-millimeter PU sandwich panels on all four walls, same specification as the roof panels. The wall panels are oriented vertically to provide continuous coverage from the floor level upstand to the eave, with no horizontal joints that could create moisture traps or thermal bridges.

Floor insulation: 100-millimeter extruded polystyrene (XPS) boards are installed beneath the reinforced concrete floor slab. The XPS provides thermal resistance for the floor and prevents freezing of the subsoil below the cold zone, which in a cold storage facility operating at sub-zero temperatures would cause frost heave and structural damage to the floor slab. Although this facility operates above freezing (2 to 8 degrees Celsius), floor insulation was specified to prevent the concrete slab from acting as a thermal bridge between the cold interior and the warm subsoil.

Vapor Barrier System

Condensation in cold storage buildings occurs when warm, moist air reaches a surface below the dew point temperature. In Dammam's coastal humid climate, the outdoor dew point temperature during summer can reach 28 degrees Celsius. The interior temperature of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius is far below this dew point, meaning that any infiltration of outdoor air to the cold zone will cause immediate condensation on the cold surfaces.

A continuous vapor barrier of 200-micron polyethylene sheeting is installed on the warm exterior side of the PU sandwich panels throughout the roof, walls, and floor perimeter detail. All joints in the vapor barrier are lapped by 150 millimeters and sealed with self-adhesive bitumen tape. Panel-to-panel joints within the sandwich panel system are sealed with PU foam injection and covered with aluminum breaker strips.

All penetrations through the cold envelope — including electrical conduits, refrigerant pipe entries, drainage connections, and structural fixings — are sealed with appropriate closed-cell foam and vapor-tight collars. The sealing of penetrations was subject to inspection at each stage of installation.

Cold Room Doors

The main product access to the cold zone is through two 2-meter by 2.5-meter sliding cold room doors with magnetic seal gaskets, self-closing mechanisms, and electric strip heaters in the door frames to prevent frost build-up on the sealing surfaces. The loading vestibule arrangement allows one door to be open for goods receipt while the other remains closed, limiting cold air escape and warm air ingress during active loading operations.

Personnel access is through two 1-meter wide hinged cold room doors with emergency release mechanisms that allow exit from inside the cold zone regardless of the door's locked state.

Refrigeration System Interface

Meituo Buildings coordinated the structural and thermal design with the client's refrigeration system engineer to confirm that the building's thermal envelope performance was matched to the installed refrigeration capacity. The thermal calculation confirmed that the maximum heat gain through the building envelope on a peak Saudi summer day — with outdoor temperature of 48 degrees Celsius and solar irradiance of 950 watts per square meter — is within the capacity of the installed refrigeration system while maintaining the required 2 to 8 degrees Celsius storage temperature.

Structural connections for ceiling-hung evaporator units were incorporated into the purlin design, with additional purlin support brackets at the evaporator locations to distribute the concentrated loads safely into the roof structure.

SFDA Compliance Documentation

The Saudi Food and Drug Authority requires that cold storage facilities for pharmaceutical products meet specific standards for temperature control, temperature monitoring, alarm systems, and documentation. Meituo Buildings provided the following documentation to support the client's SFDA licensing application: thermal performance calculations confirming the envelope meets the specified temperature range, material data sheets and certificates for all insulation materials confirming food-grade or pharmaceutical-compatible specifications, vapor barrier design drawings showing the complete envelope sealing system, and structural calculations confirming the building meets Saudi Building Code structural requirements.

Construction Timeline

The project was completed in 84 days from site mobilization to SFDA inspection readiness. Foundation construction and anchor bolt installation took 20 days. Steel frame erection took 10 days. Roof and wall panel installation with vapor sealing took 22 days. Floor insulation and concrete slab pour and cure took 18 days, running in parallel with wall panel installation. Door installation, refrigeration equipment mounting, and services installation took 14 days.

Project Outcome

The facility received SFDA cold storage approval and has been in continuous pharmaceutical distribution operation since commissioning. Temperature monitoring data from the first six months of operation confirm that the interior temperature remains within 2 to 8 degrees Celsius throughout the storage volume on all days including peak summer conditions, with the refrigeration system operating at approximately 70 percent of rated capacity under peak summer load.

The project demonstrates Meituo Buildings' capability to design and supply insulated steel structures for specialized climate-controlled applications in Saudi Arabia, including full thermal engineering, vapor barrier design, and regulatory documentation support.