Zurich Airport (ZRH) 2024

Every year, several hundred thousand aircraft land at Zurich Airport (ZRH), which leads to considerable stress and strain on the runways due to heavy traffic. To ensure the continued safety and reliability of flight operations, sections of the runways are repaired every year using Concretum® Q-FLASH 2/20 rapid-hardening concrete. This work is mainly carried out at night, when air traffic is at a standstill, to minimize disruption to operations. Thanks to the extremely rapid strength development - approx. 2 hours after production of the concrete, the concrete already has a strength of approx. 16 N/mm2 - flight operations can be resumed on time every morning. An outstanding project this year was the maintenance of runway 16/34 and its threshold, during which a total of approx. 1100 m³ of concrete was used. The renovation of the runway was particularly challenging in the area of the “fire” runway lighting and the associated cables, which were not allowed to be damaged during the work. The threshold was also re-concreted, with around 70 m³ of concrete being poured each night during this work. Despite this large amount of concrete, the runway was reopened on time at 5 am.