Motorway work on tight schedule

Improvements - including a six-lane extension - to the A1 motorway between Bramsche and Osnabrück/North in Germany have been carried out by Bunte, which is working around the clock as the main contractor on a tight schedule, with the help of Bomag.

A new asphalt mixing plant was installed near the motorway which could recycle up to 100% of asphalt which was removed. The asphalt totalled about 200000 tonnes and was planed on-site.

Bomag said a key area of the project was the compaction work, claiming the tight schedule should not create any compromise to quality. It said that having had good experience with the Bomag Asphalt Manager (AM), it was natural that Bunte wanted to test developments with the AM II system.

According to Bomag, Jürgen Schimang, supervisor in charge of asphalt construction at Bunte, had always emphasised that technical developments to construction machinery should not only increase working efficiency but should also offer the user an easy, comprehensible user interface.

It provided the opportunity to test the new AM II system on a major project on the A1, specifically on all three asphalt layers - surface, binder and base layer. The top layer was continuously laid with two pavers (hot on hot) and feeding devices. This resulted in a total of 1100 tonnes, with a 4 cm layer thickness, around the Osnabrück/North junction. The base layer near the Bramsche junction involved 1840 tonnes, with two layers each 11 cm thick. The binder placing volume was 1020 tonnes with a layer thickness of 8 cm.