By Ashley Karen
The first fully hydraulic tunnel formwork carriage with a caterpillar drive in Austria was employed on the A26 tunneling project in Linz, Austria.
The project intends to relieve congestion on the country’s urban transport network. Since May 2020, tunnel construction work to the north and south of the Danube for the access and exit routes for the new Danube bridge has been in progress.
A considerable section of the tunnel operates underground so that the noise and pollution in the urban area are decreased to an even more significant scope.
Some of the challenges that had to be overwhelmed when building the 1,600-m-long access tunnels for the new suspension bridge are five separate tunnel cross-sections, profile transitions, a tight radius of between 50m and 750m in the bends, and altering gradients.
Peri engineers generated Austria’s first customized and fully hydraulic special-purpose steel formwork carriage with a caterpillar drive and a weight of 250t to support the project. It was alone enough to make the different cross-sections in a total of 170 concreting sections.
Considering that the very tight curve radius made it challenging to transport the formwork carriage, an innovative caterpillar system was utilized to move it.
Moreover, the formwork carriage had dimensions of 8.07m in height and 14.50m in length plus 10.70m in width when ready to move and 11.20m in width when prepared to pour concrete.
Peri assembled the formwork carriage in front of the tunnel entrance, and a short time later, the first concreting section was successfully achieved. It means that the formwork could be stripped the very next day, and the formwork carriage moved ahead to the next concreting area in an efficient and time-saving way.
