About complex construction projects, innovations and digitization within specialist foundation engineering: the “Schrobenhausener Tage“ symposium at Bauer Spezialtiefbau

The event has a long history: for exactly 30 years, BAUER Spezialtiefbau GmbH has been hosting its “Schrobenhausener Tage“symposium in the conference center in Schrobenhausen. Around 340 visitors, mainly from the construction sector and research institutes accepted the invitation for the end of April 2018. This year, some 80 guests from overseas also participated. An interesting mix of exciting lectures on unusual and complex construction projects and innovations in specialist foundation engineering awaited the audience.

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The visitors were welcomed to the international part of the symposium by Arnulf Christa, Chairman of the Management Board of Bauer Spezialtiefbau, Prof. Thomas Bauer, CEO of BAUER AG, and Hans-Joachim Bliss, for several years Managing Director of BAUER Spezialtiefbau GmbH. The latter conducted the program of the international event, which was held in English. With a total of 21 nationalities, the visitors came from Europe, the Middle and Far East, the USA and Canada. The lectures focused on large infrastructural building works such as the Hong Kong-Macao bridge, the tunnel construction under the Suez Canal in Egypt or the Ampang Park underground station in Kuala Lumpur. Furthermore, the Diavik diamond mine projects in Northern Canada, a polyhalite mine in England, the Punta Catalina coal-fired power plant in the Dominican Republic and a luxury resort in Montenegro were presented. In his closing lecture, Managing Director Florian Bauer provided an insight into the fields of innovation and digitization at Bauer.

On the second day, Walter Haus and Arnulf Christa welcomed many visitors to the symposium for the German-speakers. Walter Haus, long-serving Managing Director of Bauer Spezialtiefbau conducted the program for the last time. The day kicked off with lectures on projects in Germany, all of which have faced unique challenges in specialist foundation engineering such as in Munich where, under the six-lane ‘Altstadtring’ ring road, a multistory underground car park is under construction, all while the traffic roares overhead. In this talk, and one on the Kö-Bogen II project in Dusseldorf, the clients were co-speakers. As well as the challenges that had been overcome without a hitch, they also emphasized the good and business-like collaboration with Bauer employees. Other topics included an excavation pit integrating an existing structure section in Stuttgart and a landfill encapsulation project in Bad Duerkheim (near Frankfurt am Main) for which a new construction material was developed.

The second block of lectures focusing on innovations started by looking back on the invention of the Bauer anchor sixty years ago. Presentations on the introduction of the double head technology, digitization and BIM as well as on a foundation concept in marine clay, an extremely difficult subsoil to process in the Chiemgau in South Germany followed.

Guest speaker Prof. Dr. Roberto Cudmani from the Technical University of Munich completed the cast of lecturers. Three international projects were then presented: the Corniche Tower in Abu Dhabi, the installation of shafts for a large-scale mine in England where polyhalite – an organic fertilizer – is to be extracted, and the construction of the Ismailia tunnel under the Suez Canal where a newly developed soil freezing method has been deployed, as the external contributor Michael Loeffler reported. In the evening the national and international visitors had the opportunity to listen to a talk from Thomas Bauer. A simultaneous translator was employed for the task and the non- German speaking audience members were given headsets. In his speech, the Chairman of the Management Board discussed corporate culture in general and the lived Bauer culture in particular, „because, the bigger the company, the more important it is to actively shape the company culture.“