27-Meter Ultra-High Four-Way Shuttle Warehouse: Raising the Ceiling for Refractory Materials Storage
When bulk materials weigh over a ton and dust fills the air, conventional warehousing hits a wall. Zikoo Robotics answered with a 27-meter ultra-high four-way shuttle warehouse for a refractory materials manufacturer — turning 13 vertical tiers into 3,700 smart pallet positions and six times the density of a flat warehouse.
In steel, metallurgy, and refractory production, raw and finished goods move as FIBC (flexible intermediate bulk) bags that can exceed 1.3 tonnes each. Manual handling is slow and carries real safety risk. Worse, raw-material storage, production feeding, and finished-goods intake are stitched together by hand, leaving efficiency on the table at every transfer point.
This client needed more than storage. They needed a system that would pull raw material from height straight to the production line and return finished bags to the rack without a forklift in sight.
Achievements
- A 27 m ultra-high store built on a 13-tier four-way shuttle layout
- ≈3,700 effective pallet positions within a fixed footprint
- 40,000 t/yr throughput, with capacity reserved to scale to 80,000 t
- Storage density ≈6× that of a conventional flat warehouse
- Peak throughput of 60 pallets/hour under two-shift operation
- Delivered and commissioned in just 5 months from contract signing
Project Challenges
- Extreme loads— alumina- and magnesia-based bulk bags up to 1.3 t per pallet
- Harsh environment— persistent dust from refractory raw materials
- Limited floor spaceagainst growing storage demand
- Disconnected flowbetween incoming material, feeding, and outgoing finished goods
- Continuous productionon two shifts, with storage as a potential bottleneck
Project Highlights
- Vertical space fully exploited— 13 tiers reaching 27 m
- Heavy-duty by design— racks, shuttles, and controls engineered for 1.3 t loads in dust
- Production-warehouse integration— raw material flows to a high-level feeding platform; finished bags return via underride AGV
- Digital orchestration— MES, WMS, and WCS running tasks as one
- Built for the future— fire lanes, maintenance access, and expansion interfaces reserved
ZIKOO ROBOTICS Smart Warehouse Solution
Seven four-way shuttles, four elevators, and underride AGVs run as a coordinated fleet. Raw bags are stored dense and retrieved on demand, lifted to the high-level feeding platform, and released into production with no manual handoff. Finished bags are met by AGVs at the line and carried back into the rack.
Zikoo's WMS plans every slot; the WCS drives the shuttles and elevators; the MES keeps storage in step with the production schedule. The result is a closed automation loop from 27 meters up to the factory floor.
For the loads themselves, Zikoo customized load capacity, racking structure, and motion control so the system stays stable under heavy, dusty, round-the-clock duty.
Project Value
Beyond the numbers, the warehouse changes how the plant operates. By moving ton-weight bags automatically from a 27-meter rack to the production line, Zikoo Robotics removed the manual transfers that used to slow feeding and expose workers to heavy-load risk. Storage density at six times a flat warehouse frees floor space for production rather than pallets. With MES, WMS, and WCS synchronized, every pallet is tracked and every task is scheduled — giving management a live, auditable view of inventory and throughput. Reserved capacity to 80,000 t/yr and built-in expansion interfaces mean the system grows with the business instead of constraining it. For the refractory industry, this is less a warehouse upgrade than a template for high, dense, and heavy intelligent storage.
Conclusion
From 27 meters of vertical storage to 1.3-tonne bulk bags, from 3,700 positions to 60 pallets an hour, this project shows what “dense, high, and heavy” really means for industrial warehousing. Zikoo Robotics continues to bring high-density, high-efficiency, high-reliability storage to refractory, metals, manufacturing, and 3PL operations worldwide.
Related Products
R-Bot
Four-Way Pallet Shuttle
H-Bot
Vertical Two-Way Shuttle
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