By rosebell
Including construction of a road interchange between the E17 and E34 freeways, which is also due to complete the ring road around the city of Antwerp, working on the Oosterweelknoop tunnel as a part of Antwerp’s Oosterweel road project was started by Fontec.
As the third lot of the project, for Oosterweelknoop tunnel the Fontec, Soletanche Bachy’s Belgian subsidiary, is a subcontractor for the Rinkoniên consortium (Artes / Mobilis TBI / Boskalis / CIT Blaton / Stadsbader).
In order to providing a horizontal support for working in open excavation, and a watertight screen to prevent the immersed tunnel from rising due to water in the surrounding soil, the diaphragm walls and anchored in boom clay at a depth of around 26m will be used for constructing this tunnel, wheras almost 110,000m² of diaphragm walls will be installed, ranging in thickness from 800mm to 1,500mm.
Additionall, stability of the walls, will be ensured by installing 3,350 anchors, up to 51m long. Over than two-thirds of the anchors are going to be drilled beneath the water table, through a sluice and service pulls will reach 1,400kN. The test block for the anchors was built upstream: 14 IRS anchors with test pulls of up to 3,000kN.
The date that the dredging process for a temporary navigation channel commenced around the Scheldt Tunnel construction site was April 2024. The responsibilit of building this six-lane 1.8km tunnel is up to TM Roco, a consortium of Besix, Stadsbader Contractors, Deme Group and Jan De Nul.
