Euro Airport Bale-Mulhouse, Saint-Lous – France

Project Overview

To allow Bale-Mulhouse Airport to continue to meet national and international regulations and comply with European Union Aviation Safety Standards (EASA), adaptions were required to existing infrastructure. This involved widening the underpass under the main runway, with the construction of pillars to support the extended bridge. To create space and a safe working area, a 10m high temporary cut face slope would be required with a 45° angle. With sufficient space from the boundary limit, Platipus Percussion Driven Earth Anchors (PDEA^®) could be used in place of shotcrete on a steeper cut slope. Due to the proximity of aircraft at this busy airport, work could only take place during the night to avoid disruption.

Solution

In collaboration with our French partner Euro-Tec, we proposed our cost-effective and time-saving anchoring solution to Bouygues Travaux Public. During the top-down excavation to create the slope, 40 Platipus Stealth Anchors were driven perpendicular to the slope face to a depth of 6m by using a drill rig. Each anchor was then loadlocked at a verifiable working load of 23kN, immediately securing the wire mesh and facing material to provide support to the slope face without wait or cure times. Despite works only taking place overnight, excavation and anchoring were completed in just a few days. Following the installation of the new pillars, the anchored excavated area was backfilled to finalise this stage of work.

By using the Platipus solution only 1.1 tonnes of Embodied Carbon was emitted. Comparatively, the originally proposed shotcrete solution would have emitted 4.7 tonnes of Embodied Carbon. An overall saving of 3.6 tonnes of C02e, or 77%, was achieved by using the Platipus Low Carbon Anchoring Solution (LCAS^®).