Hanwha Engineering & Construction, Iraq
Bismayah New City is a visionary dream rapidly becoming reality in Iraq thanks to the drive of South Korean contractor Hanwha E&C and the world’s biggest precast concrete plant, supplied by Elematic. For the project, Elematic equipped three enormous precast plants – Hollow Core, Battery Mould (BM) and Sandwich, each with their associated batching and mixing plant and automated concrete transportation system. The plants produce all the necessary structural components for the apartment towers, such as main walls, pre-stressed hollow core slabs, stairs and parapets, and will produce key pieces for social infrastructure buildings.
Hanwha E&C factory
| Year of delivery | 2013 |
|---|
Hollow core plant
| Halls | 4 |
|---|---|
| No. of beds | 32 ( 8 in each hall), 150 m each |
| Slab thicknesses | 220, 265, 320 mm |
Battery mold plant
| Halls | 3 |
|---|---|
| Equipment | 3 battery molds (12 casting cells each) + 72 cold shutter plates for the vertical walls |
| 18 stair molds | |
| 2 short battery molds (20 casting cells each) for traditional operation without cold shutter plates |
Sandwich plant
| Halls | 4 |
|---|---|
| Circulating lines | 4 |
| No. of tables | 300 (3.5 x 10.6 m) |
Hollow-core plant
The hollow core plant has 4 halls each holding 8 casting beds to produce pre-stressed floor slabs for the Bismayah apartments. With a total of 32 parallel casting beds, each 150m long, the hollow-core plant is very large in terms of both the number of halls and the number of beds in each – or, about four times as big as the typical size of a commonly large, international hollow-core facility.
The casting beds are 1.2m wide, giving an area of 180m2. Pre-stressed slab depths are 220 mm for apartments, and for schools and other social buildings the depths are bigger – 265 mm and 320 mm, respectively. Each hall has two extruders, which advance along beds at the speed of 1.5m per minute. Casting a bed takes about 2 hours.
Battery mold plant
Battery molds are used to cast internal, load-bearing partition walls of various sizes and shapes for the Bismayah apartment towers. The system can cast large numbers of solid walls in relatively little floor space.
In the plant, the battery molds are heavyweight, compact steel racks of vertical casting cells. After furnishing, the casting cells are pressed together by powerful hydraulic rams, and concrete is cast into heated cell spaces, as part of the industrialized high-output precast production process. The hydraulic system applies up to 150 bar pressure, creating sufficient support to counter the weight of vertical wet concrete, holding the walls firmly in the cells during casting.
For even higher production rates, a cold shuttering system is used. This employs steel plates inserted as additional shutters into the casting cells prior to concrete placement, and effectively double the number of walls a battery mold is able to cast.
Sandwich wall plant
The sandwich plant has 4 halls, and a total of 4 circulating wall lines, dedicated to precast production of the insulated external walls for the apartment towers.
Elematic supplied a total of 300 circulating flat tables (3.5m x 10.6m) for the circulation lines, 75 to each hall.
