Lifting construction at 80 meters height

SITUATION

The region of Kosovo is located right in the center of the Balkan region. The Kosovo plane is surrounded by medium to high mountains, making infrastructure access and communications more difficult. One of the bridges on the south of Kosovo - which is part of highway (Route 6) - has a height of 80 meter and goes via a long valley.

CHALLENGE

The construction of the bridge was trusted to Bechtel and its joint-venture partner Enka. After installation of the bridge bearing pads construction, engineers and supervisors noticed quality issues with the bearing pads.  Due to the high temperature differences and the height of the bridge the construction had to deal with greater expansion and shrinkage than expected. Brechtel-Enka decided to replace  the bearing pads with ones who had a better performance in these hard conditions. To do that, the complete bridge construction had to be lifted. A 1200 tonnes lifting force was needed to lift one side of the bridge.

SOLUTION

To support each bridge beam Holmatro developed 16  single acting locknut cylinders, each with a capacity of 100 tonnes. The 150 mm stroke had to prevent and minimize side load on the plunger of the cylinders. All cylinders were controlled simultaneously by a 400V Vari pump equipped with Holmatro Flow panels. The accurate needle valves of the Flow panels allowed the customer to control each lifting point - consisting of 2 cylinders - with a maximum tolerance of 5 mm between 8 lifting points.

Would you like to know more about this project? Contact us via e-mail [email protected] or call +31 (0)162 751500.