Eisele bridge building at Frankfurt Airport
19 July 2010
German crane rental company Eisele used a pair of Liebherr LTM 1500-8.1 telescopic wheeled mobile cranes to place 275 reinforced concrete bridge beams in 20 all-night operations.
At Frankfurt Airport in Germany it is planned that the north-west runway will go into service in mid 2011. The two 500 tonne cranes have been putting the concrete supports in place for the larger of two traversing bridges that will allow passenger aircraft to cross the ICE rail line, the motorway, and the airport ring road.
Construction contractor Max Bögl used sophisticated logistics. From 22.00 hours onwards, one direction of travel on the A5 motorway was closed. The Eisele crews then moved the two cranes, rigged with luffing booms, from the hard shoulder of the motorway onto the carriageways. It took about an hour for the large cranes to be ballasted and prepared to start laying the beams over the motorway.
From midnight, for four hours, trains on the high speed ICE line were diverted, giving a tight time slot for the nightly quota of seven lifts per crane.
At the storage area a 350 tonne capacity Liebherr LR 1350/1 lattice boom crawler crane was used to load the beams onto low loader trailers. Via the empty motorway the beams were delivered under the hooks of the two mobile cranes in a cycle time of about half an hour.
The 30 m, 68 tonne loads were lifted over the railway line with the cranes at an outreach of 22 metres. The beams are supports two metres wide and two metres high to bear the load of taxiing aircraft, including the Airbus 590 tonne Airbus A380.
More than 10,000 cubic metres of concrete will additionally be poured into the structure for the traversing bridge that will be 90 metres wide and 220 metres long. Its foundation is 300 bored piles.
The last concrete supports were positioned four nights earlier than scheduled. "From the logistics point of view, this was a masterpiece of work by all concerned," said Herbert Wieseckl, operations planner at Max Bögl.
