In use at the largest airport construction site in the world

The dream of flying - a dream that is taking on new dimensions in Turkey. Since June 2014 a new airport is being built in Istanbul which will be the world's largest and set new standards on completion. Bomag is very much involved in the implementation of the project - close to the Black Sea coast the company is carrying out the largest compaction project in its history, with over 130 single drum rollers.

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The columns of the terminal building already loom up towards the sky and give a first impression of the dimensions to be expected at the new Istanbul airport. Upon completion, it will extend to some 8,000 hectares, the terminal building alone extends over an area five times the size of the Empire State Building. The construction site of the major airport is located about 35 kilometres northwest of Istanbul's centre, right on the coast of the Black Sea. The area, which is a former opencast coal mine, is characterized mainly by very rugged terrain, which first has to be levelled. To do so it is necessary to remove 400 million cubic meters of soil and fill in the resulting or existing holes. About 13,000 workers are deployed on the construction site, seven days a week in two shifts in total 20 hours a day - and Bomag machines play a significant role in the execution.

At the beginning of 2015, a fleet of BW 226 and BW 216 heavy single drum rollers with padfoot and polygonal drums commenced work on the construction site. A total of 136 machines, 61 of them equipped with the Bomag Terrameter (BTM) and 45 with the Bomag Compaction Management 05 (BCM 05) with GPS - both compaction control systems - are used for the compaction control. In five major areas alone, 20 rollers are in use in each zone. The surfaces are paved in 40 centimetre layers and compacted. The compaction requirement is achieved in four passes.
To facilitate the process for the roller drivers involved, depending on the type of material, a combination of four padfoot and/or polygon soil compactors drive behind each other on a lane, followed by a smooth drum roller that finishes and documents the compaction process.

One of the challenges posed is the daily compaction checks required. With a compacted surface area per day of about two million square meters, roughly 2,500 individual tests would usually be required, which is a very costly and time-consuming process. Bomag's BCM 05 compaction control system and the Bomag GPS system offer an efficient alternative. They monitor the surface and collect all the relevant data. This is then transferred to a central laboratory, which compiles and reads it. An external consultant responsible for approving the tested areas evaluates the resulting single documents - an average of 20 per day - and checks the compaction processes. This guarantees complete documentation that in turn ensures a smooth and efficient construction process.

The single drum rollers still have plenty to do before the targeted opening of the first phase in February 2018, but they are more than up to the job and demonstrate their efficiency and performance day in and day out. With its single drum rollers, Bomag is therefore reliably doing its part to make the world of aviation bigger and better.