Daelim Succeeds in Installing the Tower Foundation
for Turkey’s Canakkale Bridge as the World’s Longest
The second caisson was installed on Canakkale Bridge in Turkey’s Dardanelles Straight.
Daelim and SK E&C announced on May 28 that they successfully installed the second caisson, the foundation to support the tower of Canakkale Bridge in Dardanelles Straight. Following the successful installation of the first caisson in mid-May, they completed the installation of the second and last caisson.
The caisson presents a layout wherein two cylindrical steel materials are mounted on the inside empty square grid-shaped concrete structure, playing a role in solidly fixing a tower at the ocean bottom.
Two caissons were manufactured for fifteen months from February last year on the land around the site. A maximum of 1,300 workers a day and 9,000 Remicon truck-load concrete were inputted, and each caisson weighs about 60,000 tons. The 47m high concrete structure alone almost equals the large theater of the Sejong Culture & Arts Center in size. A steel tower will be built on each caisson.
Tug boats are placing the caisson on the sea.
The core of the work was to place the caisson accurately at the bottom of the ocean according to the design. To this end, four tugboats moved the caisson on the sea and carried out construction with a high level of difficulty considering the movement of the waves for about 72 hours. The Daelim-SK E&C Consortium adopted a ballast device used to balance and level a ship to fill with water the empty space inside the caisson and to sink it. Accurate location measurement was carried out in real time using GPS and slope gauge. Through this, installation was successfully performed with innovative precision within the range of ±20mm and beyond the range of ±200mm as the construction error threshold.
According to an official of the Daelim-SK E&C Consortium, construction with a high level of difficulty could be successfully finished in 72 hours thanks to onsite workers’ painstaking efforts and excellent construction capabilities. “We will do our best to become a successful model of a global developer project through cooperation between Korean construction companies by completing the world’s longest suspension bridge, which can be a landmark of Turkey, with top-class quality,” he added.
