Why will the sheet piles be removed?

The excavation pit is a temporary construction, intended to allow the tunnel to be built in a dry environment. Once a portion of the concrete tunnel sections have been completed and soil has been backfilled along the outside of the tunnel walls, the excavation pit is no longer needed. Since the sheet piles of the excavation pit would otherwise interfere with future work activities, we remove them from the ground once the concrete and backfilling work are complete.

How will the sheet piles be removed?

The walls of the N2 excavation pit consist of separate, sheet piles that were placed into deep, vertical slots one at a time. We will now remove the sheet piles from the ground one by one. This is done using a large machine, called a pile driver, to which a vibrator is attached.

We attach the vibrating block to the end of the sheet pile. As the block vibrates, the earth around the sheet pile is put in motion and the sheet pile can be slowly pulled out of the ground. Sometimes vibration fails to get the earth moving. Then we have to resort to using a ram to strike the top of the steel sheet to get the soil in motion.

This article comes from a2maastricht edit released