Václav Havel Airport Prag

Initial situation

With over 15 million passenger each year Václav Havel Airport Prague is one of Europe’s busiest airports and at the same time it has a relatively small size. This makes airside areas very valuable for smooth operations and closure times problematic. In order to reduce possible closures from multiple week to only hours or days the airport operators wanted to try out a new solution with Concretum® rapid-hardening concrete. For the first time in the Czech Republic, two damaged slabs of totally 16 m³ where replaced at the airplane stands.

Solution and assessment

The Václav Havel Airport requires a compressive strength of 30 N/mm² to hand back newly cast concrete areas to operations. This strength is reached by the Concretum® Q-FLASH 2/20 rapid-hardening concrete after just three hours and reduces the closure times dramatically compared to regular concrete.

The concrete was mixed at local concrete plant and due to possible traffic delays the workability time was adjusted to a bit over two hours. On site the concrete was cast by the construction company Skanska CZ, which had no prior experience with rapid-hardening concretes.

Even with the low concrete temperatures of 10°C, the concrete developed its strength as expected and the area was available for operations soon after.
The application showed that Concretum® Q-FLASH 2/20 offers a robust solution for the renewal of time critical areas at Václav Havel Airport.