Compactors Play an Essential Role in the Construction of the Horb Viaduct

Smart Doc Boosts Process Reliability

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A new viaduct in Horb in Baden-Württemberg in the south-west of Germany is scheduled for completion in 2026. The viaduct will carry the federal highway across the Neckar Valley at a height of 70 m and relieve congestion caused by heavy through-traffic in and around the town centre. Two HC 200i compactors from Hamm are being deployed to ensure ideal compaction of the site access roads and working platforms.

The Rauschbart Construction Site Is Particularly Challenging

Site access roads for construction vehicles and six terraced working platforms with a layer thickness of 45 cm are currently under construction in the region of the town’s Rauschbart district. The terrain is steep and difficult, and the compaction quality required for the ground is critical; after all, the foundations of the piers will eventually be constructed using large-diameter bored piles on these terraces. In view of this, the lead contractor made the decision to deploy two compactors from Hamm on the project.

The two HC 200i compactors, one with a smooth drum and the other with a padfoot drum, deliver high compaction performance on the construction site and can also be easily connected to the Smart Doc app via Bluetooth® Low Energy for full-coverage compaction control and documentation.

Seamless Transparency

With the Smart Doc app, Hamm provides a valuable tool for compaction control and documentation in the earthworks sector. The app delivers a visual overview of the most important parameters, such as the number of double passes, rigidity values or the compaction progress so far, directly to the driver’s tablet or smartphone. Florian Harpf from lead contractor Gfrörer Bau also sees this as a way of making the site manager’s work easier: “If one compactor is not operating, I can use the tablet of the other compactor to see and correspondingly record what the driver is doing and whether I, as the site manager, have to intervene or explain something, or it is also possible to check from the office whether the system is recording as it should.”

There is also an option for collating the recorded data as a report that can be exported as a PDF and shared. The Smart Doc Connect function also enables process data to be exchanged between several machines. This data can then be tracked live on a browser from any location by real-time cloud communication.

Optimised Working Procedures

During the work on the Horb Viaduct, Smart Doc helped not only by increasing compaction quality and conserving resources, but also by optimising and streamlining working procedures on the construction site through a reduction of the number of double passes and ensuring a high-quality compaction result overall. “Smart Doc streamlines the construction processes. The continuous measurement, documentation and visualisation eliminate the need for the operator to perform load-bearing tests, which can take a good two hours to complete. This saves not only time but money too,” says Florian Harpf.