JOB REPORT

Last stop before the North Pole.

Runway rehabilitation at Svalbard Airport, Norway

Flights from Oslo or Tromsø are the main link of communication to the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which lies north of the Arctic Circle. Aircraft land and take off not very far from the town of Longyearbyen, the largest settlement in the islands – on what is the northernmost runway in the world.

The harsh climatic conditions prevailing in the Arctic had caused pronounced irregularities in both longitudinal and transverse direction, so that the runway was in urgent need of repair. The opportunity was used to not only rehabilitate the runway, but to increase its width from 60 m to 80 m and its length from 2,250 m to 2,435 m at the same time.

Two construction gangs took turns to enable the operation to continue in two shifts, working more or less around the clock. In a first operation, W 35 and W 1000 milling machines from Wirtgen removed irregularities of up to 20 cm in height that had formed on the runway over time. The W 1000 milled the large surfaces, assisted by the small W 35 which took care of removing the pavement around the ducts of the lighting system. The machines created a good base for the following asphalt paving operation.

The new base was then overlaid with 30,000 tons of a particularly elastic material. The Super 1900-2 paver from Vögele paved a mix consisting of asphalt concrete with polymer-modified bitumen that would be capable of withstanding tremendous temperature fluctuations without cracking. After completion of the paving operation, the joints between the individual strips were filled with bitumen to achieve perfect sealing. The client had expressly specified this particular requirement, as preventing the ingress of water into the pavement was imperative under the given climatic conditions. The Super 1900-2 from Vögele was fitted with a Big Multiplex Ski for levelling to ensure total evenness of the new runway pavement.

A narrow time window remained for compaction, as the low ambient temperature caused the asphalt to cool down very quickly. Fast compaction was guaranteed by four tandem rollers type DV 90 VO from Hamm, which applied both their oscillation and vibration drums. The asphalt was rolled in three passes applying vibration and oscillation. In the final, fourth roller pass, the DV rollers applied oscillation only to give the thin asphalt layer a perfect surface finish. The rollers were equipped with the HCQ measuring and control system, which guaranteed excellent, homogeneous compaction of the entire runway pavement.