Record seamless pave of 15.5-metre wide road in Germany
Germany’s Wirtgen Group says Berlin highway job marks ‘new chapter in the history of road construction’
A paver from Germany’s Wirtgen Group has laid a seamless 15.5 metre width road using a high-compaction screed, the first time such a feat has been accomplished.
New road-construction regulations called for the record-breaking job, which used a Vögele asphalt paver, Wirtgen Group said.
The job involved a 4km stretch of the A 10 motorway around Berlin, the capital of Germany. Both the binder and surface courses were paved over a width of 15.5m.
German Federal Ministry of Transport specified in the tender the requirement for jointless paving over the full road width of 15.5m.
According to the company, such requirements will become commonplace in the future due to new asphalt paving regulations that came into force this year, which sees thermally insulated dump boxes mandatory when transporting asphalt by lorry.
This guarantees a uniformly high temperature without cold areas in corners, bends or along the sides.
A second requirement requires the use of material feeders when building or rehabilitating federal trunk roads, applying to projects involving a continuous asphalt paved area of 18,000m² or more.
The objective of the job was to prove that top quality can be achieved, even over exceptionally large pave widths. A second objective was to prove that a virtually constant temperature can be maintained in the asphalt mix between the asphalt preparation plant and the screed when using a modern process chain.
The job was successfully carried out, and thermal imaging of the paving surfaced was taken to show the thermal homogeneity of the asphalt over the full pave width, without any segregation.
“The Super 3000-2 can build motorways and other large areas in pave widths of up to 16m without joints. Due to its extremely powerful performance, however, it is also ideally suited to roadbase construction. The paver reliably places layers up to 50cm thick in a single pass,” said Matthias Beckmann of WMH Werwie Maschinen-Handels, the company which rented the paver.
