Military Shelters Case Study
The Challenge: To Create A Military Training Environment
Live fire training is a training style with drills performed over large pieces of land, often with live fire taking place. The simulation of these mock environments is an important part of a training environment. For this purpose, KPS Global works with customers to build sustainable range shelter unit configurations. (Shown: Modular shelter configured boxes)
These modular boxes can simulate houses or shelters, and are sometimes even dressed up with props during training sessions. Drills are performed around these locations, with participants running into, around, or even lying on top of these shelters.
Unique Requirements
A shelter built for military training must be easy to assemble, configure, disassemble, and reconfigure. Since different scenarios are used for live fire training, it is important that they can be configured to function in a variety of ways, including supporting 2-story construction.
In addition, another challenge these projects face is the environment—since shelter configurations are built outdoors, and on various training locations, they must be resilient and withstand weather damage. KPS Global’s insulated panel systems provided the perfect solution since the modular designs can be easily installed in various environments, weatherproofed, and reconfigured for different drills. They can even be installed over foundation sleepers on the ground instead of the usual concrete foundation for an easy takedown.
Considerations
Instead of putting together complex structures that are difficult and time-consuming to build, assembling KPS Global structurally insulated panels is a fast, easy, and inexpensive solution.
Different solutions and materials were considered for the building of these configurations, but some were difficult to work with, hard to assemble easily, or brought various problems (bullet ricochet was a common issue, endangering people, or the use of wood could cause splintering and possible injury)
When a military supplier began looking for a structural insulated panel manufacturer to create these modular shelter configurations, they passed over manufacturers whose panels were unframed or framed only with wood (to avoid splintering or ricochet) and selected KPS Global’s INSULFRAME™ polyurethane framed panels.
Structure and Repair
The polyurethane-injected insulated panel that KPS Global manufactures was a perfect fit—not only did it avoid the potential splinters or ricochet of wood framing, but the polyurethane framing supported and reinforced the panels. This framing is covered with aluminum siding, and polyurethane foam is injected into the panel to expand and seal the panel together, filling the space.
The thin aluminum siding and foam allow bullets to pass through the panels rather than ricocheting and harming soldiers, and any bullet holes in panels are easily resealed after the training drill ends with a simple $1.65 tube of silicone.
The Final Result
In addition, our panels are easy to assemble and reconfigure. They can take as little as 15 minutes and require very few tools to put together, making them an ideal choice for assembly and reassembly. If a larger or smaller building size is needed, standard panels can simply be added or removed from the configuration. With a product life averaging 15 years in good condition, this allows for a large number of reconfigurations; but if a panel becomes too damaged by fire, it can easily be interchanged with another panel in the next configuration.
For ease of ordering, the KPS Global team numbered panels to be interchangeable between all units so that it would be easy to select the panels needed for any new shelter or to order additional panels as they were numbered universally across configurations.
The results created a movable, configurable arrangement of weather-safe, easily resealable panels.
