All-clear for the Airbus A380.

Paving concrete at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport

Amsterdam’s International Airport Schiphol is the fourth-largest airport in Europe. It counted a total of 46 million passengers in 2006, and 1.5 million tons of airfreight was moved. In the future, the Airbus A380 will also fly to Schiphol on a regular basis. Sufficiently large parking and traffic areas needed to be built first, however, to provide ideal conditions for the 560-ton wide-body aircraft.

The contractors decided in favour of Wirtgen’s SP 1600 slipform paver for building the new, highly stable concrete pavement. The concrete paver needed no more than 5 days for paving 31,500 m³ of concrete on the 27,000 m² large parking area. Paving was carried out in 6 adjacent strips, each of which was 450 m long, 10 m wide and 42 cm thick. The site manager praised the SP 1600’s daily paving rate, “2,000 m³ of concrete per day – we were able to achieve such a high paving rate only because the Wirtgen slipform paver worked non-stop and with maximum precision.”

Suitable steps were taken to improve the bearing capacity, ensuring that the parking areas will be capable of withstanding the high stresses imposed by the largest passenger aircraft in the world. To produce an exceptionally robust steel reinforcement, the SP 1600 inserted dowel bars of 45 mm in diameter into the concrete at 5 m intervals. Longitudinal tie bars were inserted to reinforce the concrete transverse to the paving direction. The SP 1600 was additionally equipped with a heavy-duty finishing beam and super smoother, which created a surface of superior evenness.

A wireless levelling system enabled the SP 1600 to achieve maximum paving precision. The maximum permitted tolerance was 5 mm over a length of 3 m in both longitudinal and transverse direction. The SP 1600 used a 3D control system with prisms and a total station to meet this goal. The system uses a special interface to transmit all signals for steering and height adjustment to a standard controller in the Wirtgen SP 1600. The resulting concrete cross-sections meet the specified requirements with pin-point accuracy.