Wirtgen heads east
06 January 2009
Germany’s Wirtgen currently has four complete paving trains in 24-hour per day operation in Azerbaijan to construct a 200 km long motorway from the capital city of Baku to the city of Quba in the north of the Asian republic.
“This is the biggest construction project in our product division to date,” said Werner Aeschlimann, product support manager for slipform paving at Wirtgen. “Four trains of SP1500L and SP1600 machines are being operated simultaneously by Akkord contractors, each comprising a bottom layer paver, top layer paver and a TCM1800 texture curing unit. We also have two further SP250 slipform pavers conducting offset work such as safety barriers, gutters and kerbs,” said Mr Aeschlimann.
“Beyond paving, we also have 40 Hamm single-drum compactors on site - compacting subsoil prior to the concrete paving,” confirmed Mr Aeschlimann.
“The concrete pavement has a total thickness of 280 mm. 200 mm are paved with bottom layer concrete, while the top 80 mm are being paved with the top-layer finish. The largest machines in Wirtgen’s slipformer paver division are working at paving widths of 9 m and 12 m respectively,” said Mr Aeschlimann.
