Stéarinerie Dubois, a company specializing in the creation and production of esters, has entrusted batir france ingénierie (Spie Batignolles) with the construction of a new building to house a quality control laboratory and a research and development laboratory, at its historic site in Ciron (36). Construction of the laboratory, which began in late 2023, will be completed in July 2025.
Batir france ingénierie wanted to make this project the pilot for a project development method based on the digital twin.
Digital innovation at the heart of the project
The use of a digital twin developed by batir france ingénierie teams is both a technical and collaborative innovation.
Previously, each software package used in a BIM approach had its own constraints and was built around a core of different data. As a result, flows between the various departments at batir france ingénierie, and with partner design offices, were disrupted.
"The challenge was therefore to work on the entire project development workflow and associated software to ensure that they were interoperable and able to work around a single core of data. In addition to instantly measuring the impact of a project modification, this innovation enables us to continuously feed data, which can be reused for all our future projects".explains Guillaume Daoulas, Managing Director of batir france ingénierie.
All stakeholders then have a real, scalable digital twin, to support the customer's informed decision-making on various aspects of the project.
At the end of June, batir france ingénierie won the major Tech Show trophy for its work on the molecular laboratory for Stéarinerie Dubois. The award recognizes the most ambitious construction projects based on innovative technology. Batir France Ingénierie was honored for its work on the adaptability of the software used to design and build the Stéarinerie Dubois laboratory around shared data. "We won this award because we have succeeded in de-siloing businesses, deploying a new approach to project development around the digital twin."says Guillaume Daoulas.
A high-tech building
The three-storey building will house two types of laboratory activities in addition to dedicated tertiary premises: a 550 m² R&D laboratory on the ground floor, equipped with a dozen large-volume fume cupboards with 2.2-metre glass fronts, and a 650 m² quality control laboratory on the first floor.
In the R&D laboratory, fume cupboards will ensure the safety of operators when handling chemical elements. The laboratory ventilation process constantly blows in air equivalent to that extracted, while maintaining the required temperature and cleanliness of the air in the premises.
In the quality control laboratory, operators will be responsible for analyzing products from the R&D laboratory and continuously monitoring the quality of products manufactured in the nearby production plant on the historic site.
As the area allocated to the laboratory's construction is very uneven, batir france ingénierie's teams designed a building adapted to this topography, with a basement that takes advantage of a difference in level of several meters.
A requirement for homogeneous temperatures within the R&D and quality control laboratory conditioned the choice of equipment retained by batir france ingénierie and constituted a real technical challenge during the building design studies.
One room in the quality control laboratory will be dedicated to the use of chromatographs. These machines generate a great deal of heat, and require the installation of additional means to maintain temperature levels compatible with good practice.
A Carrier reversible heat pump will provide heating and cooling for the building. Two Hydronic single-flow AHUs will provide controlled compensation for the two laboratories. For the tertiary sector, ventilation and air treatment will be provided by a VIM dual-flow unit. This dual-flow unit recovers over 90 % of energy produced to ensure the comfort of these premises.
"This major investment combines product and process innovation, and manufacturing excellence, in a single production facility. First and foremost, it will enable us to accelerate our innovation strategy. Our aim is to develop new products and processes, bringing proven added value to our customers and in line with the principles of "green chemistry".says Hervé Plessix, Managing Director of Stéarinerie Dubois. It also strengthens our quality control capabilities. Our customers are rightly becoming ever more demanding. Giving ourselves the means to anticipate these demands is a formidable growth lever for the company.
