How to select the ideal rapid door for your warehouse

What are High Speed Rapid Roller Doors and why are they valuable for warehouses and various industries and facilities, and what characteristics you should look for when you are looking to improve site efficiency.

What are high speed doors?

As their name suggests, High Speed Rapid Roller Doors are faster versions of conventional door systems such as roller doors or roller shutters. In order to operate at speed, the design of the high speed rapid roller door is critical to ensure longevity of parts, the most efficient energy consumption, and reliability in high usage.

High speed rapid roller doors are typically designed to integrate with traffic movements within your facility, whether it's pedestrian traffic, forklifts, vehicles or automated conveyors. For this reason, it is critical to scope the design and selection of the high speed door and ancillary activation systems to best match the traffic characteristics, and avoid costly collisions. A key requirement is that they open very fast and close slowly.

Manufacturers may install other safety features to serve this purpose so that the door can operate quickly but safely. For example, Movidor High Speed Rapid Roller Door has an integrated traffic light warning system that alerts the driver, via flashing LED lights, when a door has traffic on the other side/ is about to close or is free to open. Safety beams and soft bottom edges also allow the Rapid Door to operate quickly but without compromising safety and without requiring unnecessary repairs if the door is mistakenly impacted.

Whereabouts on a facility are high speed doors used?

In a facility with significant traffic movements, whether it's pedestrians, forklifts vehicles or delivery trucks, maintaining closed doors without serious disruption to your operations can be an Operations Manager's nightmare! By ensuring doors are kept closed for the maximum time, with good perimeter sealing when closed, energy and temperature losses through doorways can be reduced, optimum operating rhythms can be achieved, and cross contamination risks can be minimised.

How can this be overcome? With high speed doors!

High speed rapid roller doors can play an important role in meeting all the energy and hygiene control objectives of an organisation -without compromising productivity or ease of access.

So, where are they used in facility? Everywhere! Here's a few applications:

• Warehouse loading doors or dock delivery doors - for bird, dust, insect or temperature control
• Food production doorways - for hygiene, zoning, temperature control
• Coolrooms and freezers - for temperature control
• Logistics & transport - for security, zoning, traffic control
• Grain, milling industries - for dust control
• Car washes - for spray control and sustainable solutions such as collecting water spray for recycling
• Pharmaceutical - for positive pressure regulation, hygiene control.

As an architectural feature, high speed rapid roller doors can be made to match the aesthetic demands of the building. Warehouse Maintenance Managers will install high speed rapid roller doors for security purposes, or to insulate against heat or cool weather and noise.

What should you look for in high speed rapid roller doors?

According to the Door and Access Systems Manufacturing Association (DASMA), high-performance high speed rapid roller doors must satisfy the following requirements:

• They are non-residential powered doors.
• They have rolling, folding, sliding, and swinging characteristics.
• They are either high cycle (at minimum 100 cycles per day), or high speed (at minimum 508mm per second)
• They have 2 out of the 3 following attributes:
• Made-to-order for exact size and custom features
  
• Designed to withstand equipment impact (break away or self-repair if accidentally hit by a vehicle). For example, Movidor high speed doors utilise a unique curtain relocation system that inserts the door curtain back into its guides in the event of accidental impact.
  
• Designed to sustain heavy usage with minimal maintenance. Doors fitted with counter-balance springs, pulleys and wire cables may require more ongoing maintenance than those without.
  

Make sure your manufacturer satisfies the above criteria before you purchase high speed doors.

However, if you would first like to decide whether you need new doors, audit the condition of your current high speed doors with our door condition checklist: