Infrastructure maintenance on the rise

Infrastructure maintenance is critical to ensure safety

The need for maintenance on roads and bridges is on the rise, Construction Week can reveal.

Design and construction professor for Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands Joost Wallraven said that more checks on bridges are going on as structures are not strong enough to hold the amount of increased traffic.

He added that 1500 bridges in The Netherlands are no longer safe.

Story continues below

Advertisement

FEATURED COMMENT Its true. But than for what strength, they should be repaired to? bridges have lost the strength, there can be speed lim   1 Comments Read more comments »

“The problem is that traffic on the roads has increased substantially in the last few years and bridges don’t meet this demand anymore,” he said at the 2nd International Conference on Advances in Concrete Technology in Abu Dhabi.

“Now we are advancing these bridges and checking their capacity. We can cast bridges remotely using SCC to make these bridges stronger. This is a welcome material for repair.”

Just 2% of construction companies in the Gulf use SCC in their construction according to Rabih Fakih, managing director of Grey Matters, a consultancy group serving the Middle Eastern construction and concrete industries.

“SCC is the most advanced technology in concrete. It isn’t very new, it started in the 1980’s and there are many suppliers, which already produce it in the Gulf. But there is some resistance to change and consultants are more familiar with conventional concrete,” said Fakih.

SCC does not need mechanical vibration and simply flows into areas created by formwork, resulting in less time spent on site and reduced labour costs.

Europe’s SCC to conventional concrete ratio is also very small but the continent aims to have 20% of its contractors and developers using SCC by 2020.