Erfurt on the A71

Initial situation

Motorways and airports now carry extremely high volumes of traffic. This means there is an increasing number of transport surfaces to be repaired. Repair processes must be selected to keep closure periods of transport surfaces to a minimum. The rapid-hardening concrete Concretum^® Q-FLASH 2/20 has already been used at various airports and motorways, however the installation process was restricted by the manual installation process. Thus, the testing and verification of machine-based pouring processes was a matter of prime interest.

Solution and assessment

The motorway station on the A71 at Sömmerda had to be constructed as quickly as possible in summer 2015. Due to the favourable spatial circumstances and the direct proximity of the concrete plant, the best option was to construct the HGV lane with a concrete paver and the rapid-hardening concrete Concretum^® Q-FLASH 2/20. The installation was used to demonstrate the new technology to which the developer and their representatives from various airports and associations in Germany and Switzerland were invited. It was shown that it is easily possible to build a lane with rapid-hardening concrete with the help of a slipform paver and to cut the joints and open the lane to the full weight of traffic just 2 hours later. The project demonstrated that the machine-based pouring procedure with rapid-hardening concrete can also be used with no problem on large traffic services where time is critical such as motorways and runways.