Highway Resurfacing in Brazil
Unusually heavy and prolonged rainfall severely damaged the Anhanguera Highway in the state of São Paulo. One of the country’s biggest construction contractors was awarded the resurfacing contract – and used a SUPER 2100-5 X Dash 5 paver from Vögele for the first time in Brazil.
The Anhanguera Highway is one of the man arterial roads in the state of São Paulo. It connects the predominantly agricultural and industrial northeast with the major markets along the coast and the city of São Paulo over a distance of nearly 500 km. Consequently, there is a high volume of commuter traffic including heavy trucks.
Following heavy rainfall, construction contractor Val Rocha Engenharia was commissioned with the resurfacing of several sections of the highway near São Simão. The project called for milling off the road pavement to a depth of 10 cm and a width of up to 3.6 m and repaving it with a new binder course and surface layer. The project brief required the paving team to restore the highway’s former surface evenness, ride comfort, and traffic safety.
Premiere of the SUPER 2100-5 X in Brazil
For the highway rehabilitation project, the contractor decided to deploy of one of its two new large pavers from Vögele – the SUPER 2100-5 X, equipped with an AB 600 TV extending screed. As a Highway Class paver, it is designed, amongst other things, for the construction of major highways and challenging paving tasks on large-scale infrastructure projects. Powered by a 187 kW diesel engine, it achieves a maximum paving width of 14 m and a laydown rate of up to 1,100 t/h. “Thanks to the ErgoPlus 5 operating concept, it’s really easy and intuitive to use, despite its size,” says operator Otair Castro de Melo. “The application experts at Vögele trained us and showed us all the new functions. The rest more or less took care of itself.” The new automation solutions and operator comfort functions of the Dash 5 generation provide additional assistance for paver users.
Quick Commissioning at the Touch of a Button
The resurfacing of the sections of the busy Anhanguera Highway with a total length of 1.6 km had to be completed within a short space of time. The main challenge centered in paving each of the short sections as quickly as possible while maintaining high-quality standards. The paving crew therefore took advantage of one of the benefits of the Dash 5 generation right from the start: quick and easy commissioning with Paver Access Control (PAC). The control unit located on the screed enabled operators to activate all initial steps from the ground at the touch of a button.
Rapid Repositioning Between the Sections
The team also used the Pave Assist Plus function, an assistance system developed by Vögele especially for projects like this, to prevent lost time when repositioning from one section to the next. It simplifies repositioning between the different sections of the paving project: the paving team switched the paver into Travel Mode at the touch of a button. This automatically raises the augers, hydraulic hopper front flap and the deflectors in front of the crawler tracks to their top positions. The screed and tow point rams are also set to Travel mode. At the start of the next section, the paving team then activated Pave Mode, which automatically returned all components to their original working positions. As the requirements were identical from section to section, the team also saved all the relevant paving parameters and settings – such as the paving width and paving thickness, the laydown rate, course type, mix type, and the tamper bar stroke – and retrieved them just as easily with the Execute button for all subsequent sections. This assured consistently high quality and maximum efficiency on all the sections.
New Extending Screed Reduces Setup Time and Noise
The new-generation extending screed, an AB 600 TV with a tamper bar and vibrators for compacting, ensured a high degree of pre-compaction and surface quality. The hydraulic tamper stroke setting enabled the operators to quite simply select the right stroke at the touch of a button. Compared to mechanical adjustment, this saves time and is particularly practical, especially in the case of varying layer thicknesses. At the same time, the screed produces less noise than its predecessor, which noticeably improved working conditions. Additional elements of the paver’s Comfort package – including the ergonomic seat and the sound insulation in the hardtop – help the operator, in particular, maintain concentration throughout a long shift. Successfully: the work on that section was able to be completed on schedule before daybreak. www.wirtgen-group.com
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MATEK Build Smart